Disentangling democracy: What furthers immigrant social rights?

Abstract

Immigrant rights have been found to be better protected in democracies than in authoritarian regimes, but there is no systematic test of different explanations of why this is the case. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by investigating which features of democratic political systems are conducive to a subset of immigrants’ rights, namely social rights. Drawing on literatures on human rights, minority rights, and immigrants’ rights, we hypothesize that whereas electoral elements are not necessarily conducive to immigrant social rights, liberal democratic institutions and civil society participation are. To test these hypotheses, we analyze data on immigrant social rights that spans the years 1980 to 2018 and covers 38 countries around the world using fixed effects models. The level of democracy and several subcomponents thereof are measured using indices provided by the V-Dem project. Descriptively, democracies indeed grant immigrants more social rights than autocracies. However, the multivariate analyses show that disaggregating democracy indices is important. The most aggregate index of liberal democracy had no significant association with the outcome variable. When disaggregating, we found that also the electoral component has no robust effect on immigrant social rights, but the liberal and the civil society components are drivers of extensions of immigrant social rights.