Odmalm, Pontus, and Betsy Super. "Getting the Balance Right? Party Competition on Immigration and Conflict Ideological 'Pulls". Scandavian Political Studies, Vol.37, No.3 (2014): 301-322.

Odmalm, Pontus, and Betsy Super. "Getting the Balance Right? Party Competition on Immigration and Conflict Ideological 'Pulls". Scandavian Political Studies, Vol.37, No.3 (2014): 301-322.

• Political scientists mainly classify political parties along a left-right continuum, although this distinction has become increasingly blurred and meaningless. For the sake of this article, the authors assume that this left-right divide is now based on a dichotomy between liberal or interventionalist economic policy and between libertarian or traditionalist views of society; these positions being adopted by the left and right, respectively (303-304).
• Immigration in particular challenges this left-right divide. Right-wing parties are often split between pro-immigration economic liberals and anti-immigration social conservatives. This divide is mirrored in splits in left-wing parties between anti-immigration economic conservatives and pro-immigration bleeding heart liberals (304).
• Wholely conservative and wholely liberal parties have less issues with immigration, as libertarians and protectionist conservatives are both able to maintain internal consistence in their views on immigration (305).
• The author predicts that libertarian parties and statist conservative parties will be less suseptible to pressure from anti-immigration parties than their liberal conservative counterparts, and that proportional representation electoral systems will experience more strain that first-past-the-post electoral systems (305).
• The authors' methods are explained from page 306 to page 310, they analyze the hypotheses when applied to political parties in Britain and Sweden.
• The results applied to British and Swedish political parties are available on page 311.
• The study found that specific ideology of parties still matters, with the generally culturally anti-immigrant social conservative parties still being able to benefit from increased anti-immigration sentiment. On the contrary, most centre-left parties, especially Labour, were exposed to these issues because of lingering protectionist sentiments (317).
• Analysis did find that electoral systems are relevant, since Britain experienced must less pressure on liberal conservative parties than did Sweden (318). This conclusion cannot be broadly applied, since it is only based on two data points with no evidence to suggest that electoral system design is the reason for this difference.