#11 The Immigration Attitudes of Dutch voters

Immigration has featured prominently in the last Dutch parliamentary elections. It was disagreement about this issue that led the cabinet of Mark Rutte to fall last summer, and the main winner of this election was the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders, arguably one of the most prominent anti-immigration politicians in Europe.

But what are the attitudes of Dutch voters about immigration, and how do these attitudes break down across different groups of voters? I used the latest wave of the LISS panel, a large socio-economic panels in the Netherlands, to have a look at how immigration attitudes are related to different party and socio-economic factors. The latest wave was collected between December 2022 and March 2023. The wave has data on 6’157 individuals living in the Netherlands. There are a number of questions on immigration in the questionnaire, but I used agreement with the statement “There are too many people of foreign origin or descent in the Netherlands”1 as the main measure in the graphs below to capture general hostility towards immigration. As the wording indicates, this question doesn’t measure preferences about immigration inflows, but a general unease with the number of people with a migration background in the country. Here are a few results.

1. 83% of PVV voters think that there are “too many people with a migration background in the Netherlands”

Figure 1 shows the probability to agree with the statement “there are too many people of foreign origin or descent in the Netherlands”, disaggregated by voting intention between December 2022 and March 2023. For the whole sample, the percentage agreeing (to some or a large extent) is 42%. The graph is based on 2000 respondents who declared a voting intention. NSC, the new party set up by Pieter Omzigt, is not there. More than 8 out of 10 PVV and FvD voters agree with the statement, while a bit less than half of VVD voters do so. I showed probabilities in order to show confidence intervals. For some groups of voters, such as Denk (the party representing precisely people with a migration background), the average is surprisingly high but the sample is very small. One notable case is the SP, a left party whose electorate has similar levels of hostility to immigration than the right-wing VVD. This data, especially when it comes to the PVV, casts some doubts on recent ...