Strategic Responsiveness? How Parties Choose between Restrictiveness and Sovereignty on Immigration Policy

Immigration policy is of increasing electoral salience, and it often generates strategic dilemmas for legislators as positions on cross-border cooperation may clash with positions on the immigration liberalisation-restrictiveness dimension. How do legislators deal with policies where their immigration positions clashes with their positions on international cooperation (in this case European integration)? We leverage EP roll call voting data on our dataset of ideologically scaled EU acquis immigration dossiers, augmented with Parl- Gov, CHES and Eurobarometer data, and covering over 350 national parties over two decades (1990 to 2018). We find that legislators appear to adopt different strategies when dealing with the EU integration contents vs. the immigration contents of EU acquis dossiers. While they rarely sacrifice the party line on the ‘substantive’ issue of immigration regulation, they are more flexible on the EU integration dimension. The capacity to adapt on the EU issue dimension makes it likely that gridlocks can be broken, and has often meant that anti-immigrant Eurosceptic parties broke their anti-EU stance to see a policy through.