Quantifying the Effect of Immigrant Background on the Attitudes of MPs in the British House of Commons and the Italian Chamber of Deputies

This paper presents a comparative investigation of the link between the social background of immigrant national politicians and their political attitudes in the contexts of Great Britain and Italy. Several attitude studies of national legislators have been conducted but they have not led to a generalised theory (Esaiasson and Heider, 2000). Moreover, it is only in recent years that politicians with an immigrant background have begun to be elected to European legislatures and Bird (2004) has highlighted the importance of isolating an 'immigrant effect' in political science. Immigrant MPs are defined here as born abroad deputies with at least one parent born abroad. Attitudes are an important concept to consider if one is constructing a causal mechanism between social background and behaviour as they frame an individual's decision-making processes (Allport, 1935). This paper tests whether the attitudes of legislators with an almost immediate immigrant heritage significantly vary from those of their autochthonous counterparts, when other background and institutional characteristics are controlled for. We take parliamentary statements as indicators of MPs attitudes and use textual data analysis (Laver et all, 2003; Slapin and Proksch, 2008) to quantitatively determine the attitudinal variance in each group. We then use least squares regression to determine the significance of immigrant heritage, among the other independent variables, as a determinant of the attitudinal variance