The Flag or the Pocketbook: To What are Immigrants a Threat

An increasing number of immigrants and rising unemployment rates are widely thought to contribute to the electoral success of extreme right parties in Western Europe. However, no study explicitly posits the causal mechanism that links the aggregate level factors of immigration and unemployment to the electoral success of extreme right parties, and systematically analyzes whether and how this mechanism works. Thus, the causal connection between immigration, unemployment and extreme right success remains at best ambiguous. I argue that the causal mechanism linking immigration and unemployment to extreme right electoral performance is the development of anti‐immigrant attitudes at the individual level. In this paper, I examine how unemployment and immigration affect individuals’ attitudes toward immigrants. This examination furthers our understanding of the actual dynamics of how unemployment and immigration influences the electoral success of extreme right parties. I find that greater unemployment rates increase the probability that an individual will have an anti‐immigrant attitude only when immigration is already at a high level. Similarly, increasing immigration alone does not always increase the probability that an individual will have an anti‐immigrant attitude.