Immigration, economic hardship and populism in 2018 electoral outcome in Italy. Was Group Threat Theory right?

Abstract

According to Group Threat Theory, when the relative size of the immigrant population increases compared to natives, immigrants are increasingly perceived as a menace. This paper argues that right-wing populist parties have effectively exploited threat mechanisms to achieve considerable success in the 2018 Italian National Electoral Competition. The study uses a dataset at the electoral district level obtained by combining data from the Ministry of Interior data and the Italian National Institute of Statistics. In particular, the incidence of foreigners in the total population and socio-economic indicators are examined in relation to the 2018 electoral outcome of right-wing populist parties. We use spatial autoregressive models to account for spatial dependencies and spatial heterogeneity in the data. We find that the higher the share of foreigners and the lower the employment rate, the greater the electoral preference for the platform proposed by right-wing populist parties.