Immigration politics and social identities

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Francesco Raffaelli, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich.

This article investigates whether individuals ‘update’ their own social identity to match their immigration attitudes when primed with narratives that pit immigrants against another social group. First, we investigate this question with an original survey experiment on class identity in the United Kingdom. When primed with the idea that immigration negatively affects the working class, anti-immigration respondents become more likely to identify as working-class, while pro-immigration respondents dis- identify from the social group. In a follow-up study in Italy, we prime the narrative that multiculturalism erodes the relevance of Christianity in Italian culture. Primed respondents become significantly more likely to overstate their Christian identity. This study provides a novel perspective on the relationship between the ‘new’ politics of immigration and traditional cleavage politics. When elites strategically link immigration to other dimensions of political conflict, ‘old’ social identities such as class

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