Gibson, Rachel K.

About the author: Rachel K. Gibson is a lecturer in Politics at the University of Salford and has studied West European anti-immigrant politics for a number of years. Her most recent work in the area has been focused on Australia as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University. She received her PhD from Texas A&M University.

Growth of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe

2002 0-7734-7269-X
The book explains the rise in support for parties in Western Europe with a strongly anti-immigrant stance during the early 1990s. Using extensive multi-level data analysis that combines individual and party opinion data with aggregate statistics from a total of fourteen Western European nations, it concludes that support comes from a combination of ‘overt’ racists who articulate a highly unapologetic form of racism, and ‘covert’ racists who attempt to hide their racism in practical arguments about immigrants' deleterious socio-economic effects.. “. . . makes a useful contribution to the study of anti-immigrant political parties as well as to the study of how certain attitudes might motivate political behavior. . . . The implications here are important: culturally rooted prejudice is difficult to address with public policies and constitutes a greater destabilizing force than does economic opposition to the presence of immigrants. . . . many parties and many Western European nations are examined. This cross-national focus - with attention to country-specific variation – makes the tests of the hypotheses more rigorous than if they had been tested with data from a single country.” – Patricia A. Hurley