The Political Geography of Immigration Discontent

How does globalization influence domestic politics in advanced democracies? International factors can be extremely powerful in shaping domestic politics, whether they are operating invisibly in the background or highly salient. In my dissertation, I shed some light on these complex dynamics by looking at one of the most relevant factors for domestic politics: international migration. In doing so, I reserve particular attention to the local contexts under which international shocks are received. The local realization of global phenomena is not only interesting per se, but it also enriches our understanding of the scope conditions under which theories of discontent apply. Does anti-immigration backlash vary across geographies? If so, what determines those differences? The urban-rural divide in voting for anti-immigration parties is one of the most striking patterns in contemporary Western democracies. In a first paper, I ask why cities are different. I propose that the interaction between city size and residential segregation plays an important role in determining the image of cosmopolitan city centers. In large cities, segregation reduces the probability of contact between immigrants and natives and, hence, it reduces the salience of the immigration issue in the decision of how to cast a ballot. I show that in France large and small municipalities are equally likely to vote more for far-right parties in response to immigration when segregation is low. However, in large cities the effect fades away as segregation increases. When the electoral response to immigration is analysed at the polling station level, i.e. when segregation is naturally controlled for, then standard results in the literature appear: (i) more immigration is associated with more far-right vote, (ii) more so if the immigrant population is very distinct from natives, (iii) more so if immigrants compete with natives for welfare. Moving beyond the urban-rural dichotomy, in a second paper I investigate the still largely unexplored politics of suburbs. Most immigrants in Western Europe live in large metropolitan suburbs. Natives in the same suburbs are the privileged target of far right-wing politicians. How does immigration shape voting in large metropolitan suburbs? This study is the first to address this question directly. The answer is far from obvious, because metropolitan suburbs are located between the cosmopolitan city centers and the nationalist countryside. I exploit a natural experiment across French metropolitan suburbs, consisting of a legal population-based discontinuity in the provision of social housing. I show that municipalities that increased their supply of social housing over the period 2000-2015 also experienced an increase in the share of immigrants over natives, resulting in more support for the far-right in the 2017 presidential election. The evidence suggests the presence of a behavioural, rather than economic, motivation. Understanding discontent involves an important measurement problem. Constructs are often vague and the willingness to express sincere preferences is far from random. An important line of my research aims at developing techniques for eliciting political dimensions from natural language processing. In a joint work with Elliott Ash, we develop a new method to study political rhetoric and, specifically, to detect emotional and cognitive language. We start from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count word lists for affect and cognitive processes, to construct two poles within a word embedding space. We train a word embedding model on the corpus of speeches given in the American Congress between 1858 and 2016. For each speech, we define the emotionality score as the relative distance from each of the two poles. With our new measure, we study whether and how political language has evolved over time and across groups, and how it responds to electoral incentives and national broadcasting.