Replication Data for: The electoral payoff of immigration flows for anti-immigration parties: the case of Italy’s Lega Nord

The aim of this paper is to examine and quantify the relationship between regular immigration and vote for anti-immigration parties in Italy’s eight Northern regions – from 1992 to 2015 – and in Italy’s 45 Northern provinces from 2004 to 2015. Firstly, we identified the Lega Nord as Italy’s main xenophobic party, then we used a fixed effects regression model for panel data to test our hypothesis, while controlling for a series of social, political and economic variables. Our results suggest that there is a positive and significant effect: an increase of 1% in the number of new regular immigrants is associated with an increase of more than 2% in the votes expressed to the Lega Nord, voters turnout is significantly and negatively associated with Lega Nord’s votes and a high perception of crime – but not actual crime – is positively associated with anti-immigration votes. At the provincial level we also found a positive association between Muslim foreign population and Lega Nord’s votes. These results ought to be considered along with the fact that Northern Italy is highly representative of the wealthiest and most densely populated regions of Europe, suggesting the possibility that similar phenomena could be witnessed in other comparable contexts.本研究旨在考察并量化1992年至2015年意大利北部8个大区，与2004年至2015年意大利北部45个省的合规移民与反移民政党得票之间的关联。首先，我们将北方联盟（Lega Nord）确定为意大利主要的排外政党；随后采用面板数据固定效应回归模型（fixed effects regression model for panel data）检验研究假说，同时控制一系列社会、政治与经济变量。研究结果显示二者存在显著正向关联：新增合规移民数量每增加1%，北方联盟的得票率将提升2%以上；选民投票率与北方联盟得票率呈显著负相关；民众对犯罪的高感知度（而非实际犯罪率）与反移民得票率呈正相关。在省级层面，我们还发现外籍穆斯林人口数量与北方联盟得票率呈正向关联。鉴于意大利北部是欧洲最富裕、人口密度最高的地区之一，本研究结果具有较强代表性，这表明类似现象或可在其他可比场景中出现。