What are we missing? Explaining immigrant-origin voter turnout with standard and immigrant-specific theories

Large-scale immigration is one of the most prominent challenges facing developed countries around the world. As a direct consequence of these demographic changes, the number of voters with an immigrant background is steadily increasing. As these ‘immigrant-origin voters’ – who we define as first- or second-generation immigrants1 now holding the citizenship of their country of destination – often cluster in bigger cities or regions, they can easily become decisive for electoral majorities. However, immigrant-origin voters will only be able to translate demographic influence into political power if they decide to participate in elections. For political scientists, the crucial question is thus how to explain immigrant-origin voter turnout. In theoretical terms, we can summarise existing findings by differentiating between two perspectives: (1) The electoral turnout of immigrant-origin voters can be explained by the same theories that we use for native citizens. In short, the well-established standard approaches of electoral research are also applicable to immigrant-origin voters. (2) In contrast, standard models of electoral research might not be sufficient to explain the electoral turnout of immigrant-origin voters. Rather, immigrant-specific approaches might be more relevant or might decisively moderate the impact of standard explanatory variables. Most prominently, the roles of ethnic networks (e.g. Fennema and Tillie, 1999; Jacobs and Tillie, 2004), ethnic identity (e.g. Schildkraut, 2005; Valdez, 2011), and discrimination experiences (e.g. Schildkraut, 2005; Oskooii, 2018) have been discussed. What motivates this research note is not establishing a new approach to explain immigrant-origin voter turnout but to rigorously test the theoretical perspectives against each other. For this, we take up a standard electoral research perspective and ask what immigrant-specific approaches have to offer in terms of additional explanatory power. We focus on Germany, where approximately 10 percent of the electorate is now made up of immigrant-origin voters, coming especially from Turkey (1.2 percent) and the former Soviet Union (3.2 percent) (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2017). Using a recent high-quality survey of immigrant voters carried out after the German federal election of 2017 - where the reported turnout rates of immigrant-origin voters were found to be 15 to 20 percentage points (67–74%) lower than for the native population (88%) - we (1) compare the drivers of i