When do European center-right political parties make appeals to visible minority voters? What are the consequences of these strategies on the contours of national identity? Traditionally, European center-right parties portrayed themselves as defenders of the nation and have been willing to stoke fears of growing minority populations for electoral gain. Yet in the past twenty years, many of these parties have increasingly reached out to visible ethnic minority voters through organizational, programmatic, and symbolic means.
To explain this shift, the literature invokes two rationales: outreach is either an attempt to siphon off a portion of a sizable constituency or it is a tactic to garner the support of centrist white voters. These analyses are lacking because they do not consider outreach in proportional systems nor do they identify the conditions under which one type of outreach predominates. Moreover, scholars ignore the trade-offs inherent in reaching out to a constituency that a political party previously marginalized.
This project fills the gap in this literature by adjudicating between the rationales for outreach and gauging the effects of these strategies on national identity. Identifying the determinants for outreach merits an explanation as it has implications for the representation of minority interests: Outreach pursued to soften the party's image will not further the interests of visible minorities, whereas outreach targeted toward visible minorities will. To gain leverage on party rationale, outreach is disaggregated outreach into substantive and symbolic appeals. This project argues that to be credible and acceptable to conservative constituencies, center-right parties couple outreach with tough rhetoric on immigration, and recast national identity to include visible minorities without distorting its preexisting form. This project uses computational linguistics to help create the dependent variable of outreach from media reports, and employs a multinomial multilevel model to test its hypotheses regarding the determinants of outreach. It also includes interviews with party elites and community leaders in Denmark, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands to gauge establish the mechanisms behind the correlations, as well as gauge how preexisting notions of national identity influence how parties cast "the nation" in their appeals.
The broader impacts of this project are two-fold. First, it provides a much needed comparative analysis of parties and visible minorities. Previous studies have either focused on local politics in a handful of cities or explained the integration of visible minorities into a single country's political party system. This study takes a decidedly comparative view, explaining when visible minorities become the object of party competition. Second, it generates insights on the dynamics of national identity and the interplay between identity and institutions. Large-scale immigration in the post-war era has disrupted the European myth of the homogeneous nation-state, forcing Europeans to rethink what it means to be a member of the national community. This fundamental question regarding the substance of national identity can be best explored through the lens of political parties. Through their positions on ethnic relations and immigration policies, we observe elite and popular debates over identity, and how identity builders handle these trade-offs in the context of varying electoral institutions. Consequently, the project analyzes the interplay of identity and institutions.
