Box 3.2 Tougher restrictions on refugees: cleavages, motives and voting behaviour

VOX analysis* found the usual pattern of participation: the older generation, highly educated people and those with party affinity contributed more to the slightly higher than average participation of 42 per cent.

A. Cleavages

Voting behaviour first mirrored the right-left divide presented by the parties: voters with affinity to the People's Party (90 per cent), the radicals and liberals (88 per cent) and Christian democrats (70 per cent) massively supported the law. On the other hand, voters with affinity to the social democrats (41 per cent) the greens (37 per cent) and small left-wing parties (9 per cent) were clearly opposed to the policy of asylum restrictions. The ratio between voters of the political right and left was about 2:1. Note, however, that voters with no party affinity constitute a good majority of all voters. In the vote of April 1987, they supported the project by 72 per cent. In questions, such as the above where the traditional division between the right and left is decisive, the left has a chance to win only if it can sway voters with no party affinity.

The right-left divide however, was not the only factor determining voting behaviour. Age had a considerable effect: among people of 20 to 29 years of age the proposition found no majority (46 per cent); older people wanted tougher restrictions (58-82 per cent). Education, too, had a strong effect: the higher the education, the more liberal the attitude toward hosting refugees. Citizens with basic education massively supported the law (88 per cent), whereas voters with university education rejected restrictions (41 per cent).

B. Motives: An Interpretation

The motives of the citizens proved to be similar with earlier popular votes about restrictions on foreign workers.** With a proportion of 16 per cent foreigners among the resident population, social tensions and problems are inevitable. The xenophobic right used the asylum issue successfully to renew the older and more important question of policy on foreign workers and immigration. In this situation we can distinguish three main groups, all with different motives:

• Sceptics: protagonists of restrictions on immigration and asylum seekers shared a variety of motives that ranged from feeling the necessity to set limits on the proportion of the foreign population, wishing to protect traditional Swiss values, to the fear of losing social status, overpopulation or the loss of Swiss identity.
• Liberals: protagonists of freer access were mainly acting according to humanitarian and egalitarian beliefs, but they may have had different reasons: congruence with liberal ideologies of the left and the greens, or the fact that younger persons had grown up with a high proportion of foreigners, or that more higher educated people had been less exposed to the negative effects of a high immigration flow.
• Pragmatists: whereas the attitudes of sceptics and liberals rarely change and lead to a stable voting behaviour, pragmatists were more flexible. More than defending social values, the voting behaviour of the pragmatists depended on utilitarian considerations. Therefore this group voted against or for restrictions on immigration or asylum seekers depending on how they felt they would be affected by the regulation. This attitude is typically found among occasional voters with no party affinity, but also among voters with radical affinities.

  *See: VOX no. 32, July 1987.

  **See Wolf Linder, 'Migrationswirkungen, institutionelle Politik und politi-sche Offentlichkeit, in W. Kalin and R. Moser (eds), Migrationen aus der Dritten Welt (Bern: Haupt 1991) (2) pp. 152-5.