Ethnic Segregation and Radical Right-Wing Voting in Dutch Cities

Abstract

Previous studies have linked anti-immigrant voting and other indications of ethnic animosities to ethnic segregation, yielding different results. In this study, we focus on the locally strongly diverging support for Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom ( Partij voor de Vrijheid [PVV]) in the Dutch national parliamentary elections of 2006 and 2010 to assess how it can be understood that the effect of ethnic segregation on anti-immigrant voting varies, and how this can be theoretically interpreted. Our analyses on 50 Dutch cities demonstrate that ethnic segregation leads to PVV voting, and that this positive effect is stronger in cities with a more tolerant cultural atmosphere and lower levels of unemployment. This positive effect is at odds with ethnic threat theory, and our contextualization informed by the cultural and economic conditions of cities enables empirically distinguishing between contact theory and concentration theory. Whereas both predict a positive effect, only contact theory is corroborated by our results.