Immigration in Berlin

Political participation
Immigrants’ electoral behavior
in Germany and Berlin
Electoral behavior from immigrants within
Germany, and compared to the capital Berlin
who claims to be different from the country, is
not different at all.
Berlin is a city with more than 800,000 people
with migratory background, but it is not the
city with most migratory background in
Germany, as would be expected being the
capital. Despite the large population with
migratory background, does a city that claims
to be different from the rest of the country also
have a different behavior when it comes to
voting for those migrants? I will try to give an
answer to this question trying to explain it from
different social group perspectives such as
gender, age or level of studies, with the data
collected from the European Social Survey
201 2, Germany, N = 542, and compare it to
literature on the same topic in the city of
Berlin.
What stands out when analyzing voting
behavior in Germany is that most migrants
vote for parties that the European Social
Survey classifies as “Other”, which probably
are parties that do not classify themselves in a
traditional way, making them neither right nor
left-wing parties. With a 57.2% it is the most
voted category no matter the range of age the
migrant is in.
However, trying to analyze the electoral behavior
from a gender or a household income
perspective does not have any effect on the
ideology of the voters.
Is Berlin really different?
So is Berlin different from the rest of the country?
In this case, and despite the categories
given by the ESS, we can still observe that
most of the migrant voters prefer to vote leftwing
parties (23.8 % of immigrant voters) over
right-wing ones (1 9% of immigrant voters), and
this goes in the same direction as the voters in
the capital city, where 65% of immigrant voters
vote for either SPD or Die Grünen, against 8%
who voted for the CDU. In conclusion, we
cannot really say that the behavior is different
in Berlin than in the rest of the country, on the
contrary: it is similar probably because these
left-wing parties defend the social rights for
immigrants, unlike right-wing parties.
Bibliography:
Jonas-Correa, M. (1 998) “Different Paths: Gender
Immigration and Political Participation” International
Migration Review. Vol.32, No. 2, 326-349
Loch, D. (201 4) “Immigration, segregation and social
cohesion: is the German model fraying at the edged?”.
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 21 :6, 677-
692
Parry, G. Moyser, G. Day, N. (1 992) Political Participation
and Democracy in Britain. (First Edition). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
Rytz, H. (201 1 ) “Ich bin ein Berliner – The immigrant vote in
the Berlin elections of 201 1 ” taken from
http://www.aicgs.org/issue/ich-bin-ein-berliner-theimmigrant-vote-in-the-berlin-elections-of-201
1 /
Mireia Casado Olivas,
Erasmus exchange student from
Universitat de Barcelona,
BA in Sociology, 4th year
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