good morning thank you for your lively interest in this debate this morning let me present to you professor joseph zweimeler from zurich my name is tobias piller i'm german journalist professor zweimeler is austrian and he's been a director of the london-based center of economic policy research research cpr and this is a place which does economic research related to the labor market so he is working on the labor market on the welfare state and on a relationship greatly between labour market and the voting of citizens this should be an interesting topic to us because there is a question of globalization which also moves economies not only in europe but all over the world and then at the same point gives you a lot of migration and migration again starts to have political effects if you have a quick look at numbers in europe you will find that between 2010 and 2018 in only nine years we had six million applications for political asylum and these were not people only who would want who who had the right to asylum but who was were also migrants so that is a bit more than one percent of the european population germany had 2.1 million applications in nine years 2.6 percent of the population italy a little bit less only zero seven percent it's a bit less than half a million but if you look at places like malta uh you you can see also a certain pressure on the population because they had 27 000 applications for asylum but in relation to their population that is a lot it's nearly six percent of their population so if you send only a few hundred people to malta it has a big effect the question is why do we have in some european states some real strong political political reaction and why do we have less reactions in states that even have a lot of immigration or a lot of asylum applications so we are interested to hear professor tzeinmiller on this please let me say something organizational there are some kind ladies in an orange t-shirt who have agreed that they will be so kind to bring written questions to me so while you listen to professor zweimiller you can already write a question in english or in italian to me and i will then present the questions to professor twymiller either right in the middle if there is something really urgent or at the end of his presentation so please refer to the to the lady in the orange t-shirt who will who's got some paper with her and who will bring the questions to me thank you professor twymila please okay thank you very much it's a pleasure and an honor to be here and to present uh on globalization and the rise of right-wing parties and the fall of social democracy so if you look at empirical evidence we all know that right-wing populism is on the rise in europe and when i talk about europe now i will mostly talk about western europe which i mean 16 european countries eu 6 eu 15 minus greece plus switzerland and norway so these 16 countries comprise a population of roughly 400 million inhabitants and somewhat more than 210 million individuals have voted in the last elections of this 210 plus million more than 25 or around 25 million have voted for right-wing populist parties in the recent election at the same time what we see is a collapse of social democracy so back in the late 1990s more than 70 million have voted for social democrats in the last election by the year 2018 this has gone down to 45 million so you see a really a tectonic shift in the political landscape in western europe and we're talking a lot about this and uh mainly there are two important perspectives that i want to mention here is one uh mentions that there are traditional values and identity as one important drivers in the sense that elites have pushed liberal rights too far focused on gender equality gay rights ethnic diversity and environmental protection and so on and this is not really kind of in the interest or maybe also against the will of ordinary people and the second main perspective would be the economic perspective which about which i will be talking mostly today this says that globalization uh has produced winners and losers and there is an increasing divide between those who are left behind and those who gain from benefit from the globalization process and importantly the number of people who fear to be left behind is growing so both views are of course uh important and uh and relevant but in this lecture after all we are in the festival of economics i will talk about the economic perspective let me just uh mention uh results from a uh from a recent survey there are many such services this is just an example that just makes clear that globalization is really thought felt as a threat by many individuals this was conducted by the battlesman foundation an august 2016 survey and in the eu 28 45 of respondents agreed or strongly agreed to this statement there's of course variation across countries but what is very clear from this survey is that the right-wing voters say the afd voters from western germany or from germany or later nor in italy they disproportionately would support and agree with this statement similarly if you ask individuals are you are your current economic prospects have become worse is your future economic outlook bad then a substantial fraction of vote of individuals would agree or strongly agree to this statement again a disproportional agreement among right-wing voters now the evidence suggests that indeed globalization is considered a threat and a threat that is associated with economic outlooks that look bad for many individuals in particular for the less educated for blue-collar workers for older individuals for males now in this lecture i want to address the question did globalization affect voting and in economics we have a kind of workhorse model that can explain why globalization produces winners and losses so we are i will be focusing on two main aspects of the globalization process which is immigration and trade and the outline of the talk will be that i first will review uh existing empirical evidence and then i will also show you some preliminary evidence from an ongoing project where we study this question and actually when tito boheri was inviting me to present a year ago i was very optimistic and hope that i will be able to present only about my ongoing project but unfortunately this has become has turned out to be much more complicated to put all data together but i think i have something to say and i hope that you will have many comments about it so let me very very briefly say about what economic what a standard model of economics would say about the windows and loses of globalization this would be about the labor market where we have high and low skilled workers in in the equilibrium on this labor market productivity and wages would be aligned so high skilled workers get well paid low skill workers get low wages and the employment prospects of the low skilled workers would be worse than the employment prospects of the highest killed and we can look now at in this at this framework how immigration would affect uh the labor market there would be so if immigrants are disproportionately low skilled and this is actually what is going on in most countries not in all countries but in most countries in western europe then what this implies is the relative supply of low-skilled workers increases the low-skilled labor force becomes increasingly abundant there will be a pressure on wages and for low skilled native workers this means that they face higher competition on the labor market and worse labor market outcomes similarly when we look at international trade and trade international trade has substantially increased in part due to increases from of imports from low-income countries that have typically a low skill intensity then this means that the relative demand for low-skilled workers decreases so domestic firms face fierce competition which means that low-skilled jobs become increasingly destroyed which leads to the decline of the manufacturing sector now what this is the theory what does the evidence tell us okay this model works quite well you can explain wage inequality what we see in the data the skill premium uh the difference between high and low skill wages is increasing in many countries and we have a persistent gap in employment opportunities between the higher and the lows killed now if we think about what happens if there is immigration what is the empirical immigra effect of immigration on labor market outcomes so interestingly we see that there is no clear evidence of immigration on labor market outcomes of native workers this may be surprising but actually empirical economies have a hard time to establish such a relationship but and this is different from what empirical research has documented with respect to imports from low-income countries where we see clearly a detrimental labor market impact of uh of imports and manufacturing employment so one important paper to which i will refer later on once again is the famous china shock paper by by david auturn and co-authors okay now let this brings me to the first question what does the literature tell us about the effect of immigration on the rise of right-wing parties i mentioned the labor market effects and through which immigration may affect voting behavior but of course not only labour market considerations but many other considerations are relevant there's a long rigid literature in political science and sociology that for instance emphasized the collective threat hypothesis that would say that an increase in immigration should increase the support for right-wing parties because an increasing immigrant group may challenging the natives economic social and cultural dominance there's also the contact hypothesis that goes in the opposite direction that essentially says that if there's more intergroup uh interaction then prejudices of the majority against the minority might decrease which actually would uh kind of uh destroy any impact of immigration on uh on anti-immigration sentiment so let's look at the empirical evidence and i want to show you some studies that have been conducted recently and these are single countries studies and let me study with the with austria where i come from and why i have done a research uh on my own so this is uh an uh a recent uh from from the recent election campaign you see the austrian former fbi party leader whom you all had has had to resign after the recent scandal and this shows you very clearly that in recent in the recent election campaign they took a very strong stance against immigration but this has been so uh from back from the mid 1980s when you al-qaeda took over the party so this is here what we see uh is a time series of uh is a time series of the immigrant chair in austria over the period of the early 1960s up until the year 2011 and you see that in the mid 80s or from the mid 80s until the early 90s immigration was very strongly increasing and this coincided with the asylum wave from after the breakdown of former yugoslavia and at the same time votes for the fbi were during that period are very strongly increasing okay now what we do in a in an empirical research paper we study the question whether high immigration locations within austria did indeed gain more vote support whether the fbi didn't did indeed get a lot of support from from voters and what we exploit here in this research is that there's a huge variation in the immigrant chair across locations so if you look at the 2011 census then the average immigrant share in the entire country was somewhat more than 10 percent but the standard deviation across locations and these are municipalities is an order of magnitude that is almost similar to the mean is 7.7 percentage points so we essentially can compare locations that have a high immigrant share or actually that gained a lot of immigrants to location that did not and we look at seven national elections we can uh look at 2300 municipalities and we exploit census data for the various censuses to characterize municipalities in much detail and also be able to characterize the local voting population what we find is that local immigration indeed has a significant impact on local fb votes but actually the impact is not particularly large we find that a one percentage point increase in local immigration leads to a point sixteen percentage point increase in fpu volts which explains uh something but not very much of the original variation in fp rewards in fbi support that we actually see okay the effects that we see is that uh are consistent with the labor market with adverse labor market prospects but also with neighborhood quality schools and so on of course what you have to worry about if you do comparison across locations where the mobility choices may contaminate the effect because it could be that immigrants avoid locations where there are a lot of where there's a lot of anti-immigration sentiments well it could also be that uh the native population leaves locations there's a lot of immigration okay and we make sure that this result that we get is not contaminated by this by such mobility choices let me briefly say something about a study on italy which took which was conducted about at the same time as ours and this looked at uh immigration and support for the casa de la liberta this is a study by baroni and co-authors and as you all remember the casa de la liberta comprised at the time the forza italia and the alliance in arsenal alliance nationale and the lago north and both of these latter parties were of course strong strongly opposed against immigrants they use a similar approach than ours and find a much stronger effect they actually find that one percentage point increase in local immigration increases vote shares for the casa de la libertad is 0.686 interestingly they find that the effect is very large in small municipalities but does not exist in big cities this is actually a result that many other studies find it's probably also kind of consistent with many discussions that we have about the rural urban divide and they also find that the immigration effect is particularly strong when immigrants are culturally more different in particular muslim immigrants now the literature here these were just two examples of a growing literature and the literature actually the majority of studies and here i have an incomplete list of recent studies finds that immigration provides tends to provide support for right-wing parties interestingly there are two recent studies that find support for the contact hypothesis this is in the context of asylum seekers they compare municipalities that could provide housing for asylum seekers to other emergency policies that need that did not have housing for asylum seekers and this comparison shows that locations that house the asylum seekers indeed in the austrian case at least it was that sub support for fpu votes was also increasing but it was increasing less than it was increasing in municipality that did not uh sub uh house uh asylum seekers okay so the literature basically tells us there is the majority of studies does find an impact of immigration on support of writing parties the studies are though not very easily comparable for many reasons and uh there is certainly a need for comparable cross-country studies so that we can really precisely compare cross-country experiences and also kind of in the next step evaluate effects of immigration policies this brings me to the second point namely the the question whether international trade has an impact on political preferences so why should international trade have an impact what we see in the empirical data is that the rise of chinese imports that took place over the last decades was associated with a decline of the manufacturing sector this shows the u.s experience is taken from the famous paper by author dawn and hanson aer 2013 and it shows that the blue line is the rise of chinese imports is associated over time with the fall of the manufacturing sector this what is frequently called the china import shock actually did strongly affect local labor markets and local labor markets were actually differentially affected because they were differentially exposed to input competition due to differences in the pre-existing industry structure and this is this point is made by the paper by autodown and hanson which is probably one of the most influential papers in economics that was was published over the last years and they find that the increase in china input penetration explains roughly one-fourth of the decline in u.s manufacturing okay now in western europe this is u.s and we are talking here about western europe so how are things in western europe so here i have a graph that shows you on the horizontal axis the share of chinese trade as a fraction of eu 16 of the 16 western european country gdp drawn against the share of the manufacturing sector and also in europe you see chinese imports have increased they have increased substantially over the period and this was associated very very closely to the decline of manufacturing now this is about chinese trade and how it affected manufacturing employment so let's look about how did it affect voting behavior okay first let's again look at u.s evidence and here i want to briefly mention one paper by ottawa by david auto and co-authors that have used their china shock framework studying voting outcomes and what they find is actually that the support for the republican party is strong in locations that experienced more increases a higher increase in chinese imports and then they do an interesting counterfactual experiment a thought experiment and ask what would have happened to voting outcomes if china's input growth would be 50 smaller than it actually was okay and it actually turns out that three swing states namely michigan wisconsin and pennsylvania would actually have elected democrat rather the democrat rather than the republican candidate and this would have implied that hillary clinton rather than donald trump would have become the u.s president now this is one piece of evidence but there's also other recent evidence that goes in the same direction and says that chinese imports have strongly uh changed the political contributed to this change in the political landscape how about europe we have one interesting study in europe actually about two italian colleagues kalantone and stanik that had a paper published in the american journal of political science that looked at 198 europe western european regions and a large number of elections since the late 1990s and what they find is that also in europe chinese imports have an impact on voting behavior in particular they find that chinese imports increase vouchers for nationals easier isolationist and radical riot parties in that empirical effect is actually quite uh strong there are also other studies that go european studies that go in the same direction there's one study for germany and others studying for france that find a pretty similar effects so if we summarize uh the empirical results on import competition and voting then we we can say there's clear evidence that import competition shifts voters towards right-wing political parties there is a cross-country a lot of cross-country evidence that or one caveat may be that what we the empirical studies for europe are typically based on a relatively large level of aggregation these are the nuts two regions according to the european classification original classification so this is something where in our project about which i will be talking uh in a minute i will be trying to improve and uh interestingly the existing studies do not say much about social democracy and social democracy as we have seen at the very beginning has lost many many votes and the question is is social the support for social democrat democratic parties affected by globalization we also lack as i mentioned before systematic cross-country evidence that looks at the combined effect of immigration and import competition it could be that these two developments reinforce each other or maybe go in the opposite direction okay so this is the last third point that i want to talk about in this talk is about globalization and voting behavior in western europe this is a project that i contact with my zurich colleague david dorn so the main idea of the project is to put together a new data set where we look at the finer regional level of aggregation so these are not nuts two as previous studies have used but not three regions one aggregation level uh deeper then a particular focus of our of our study is the fall of social social democracy which was dramatic since the mid 2000s and we also want to look simultaneously at immigration and trade and study whether these two variables interact with each other i also want to mention that the all slides and empirical results that they show you now is preliminary okay we have i'm pretty sure that there is no big mistake in it but it may you never know okay so we have as i mentioned 16 countries we have 1038 regions and we have 118 elections and now i will provide some descriptive empirical evidence first we look at western europe as a whole second we look at country level evidence and finally we can look at regional level evidence so let's look first at the trends that we see globalization and voting for western europe as a whole social democrats if you take the most we compare 19 early 1990s to the most recent elections then social democrats are down from uh 35 in 1990 to 22 in 2018. so this is a very very strong decline and right-wing populist parties are up from 2.5 2.5 to 10.5 percent in 2018. so this means that the recent uh that the recent social democrat losses are larger than the right-wing gains and this change has happened mostly after 2004 as i showed you now let's check how closely these voting trends are linked to the decline of manufacturing employment and to the increase in immigration and here is a graph that has on the horizontal axis the share of workers in manufacturing okay and the share of manufacturing as you if you can can read it has decreased over time so on the left we have a higher share on the right we have a low share okay and what has happened over time is that if you look at the red line then this shows the vote losses of social democrats since the year 1990. so this is this is a negative number but there was not a strong trend up until 2004 okay but since 2004 uh the vote losses increased and this was associated also with a speed up of the decline in the manufacturing sector particularly after the financial crisis 2008. okay at the same time we see an increase in writing voters but the striking picture that we see here is that the losses of democracy is substantially larger than the than the gain of right-wing parties now another interesting piece of evidence is how our voting trends related to immigration trends here you see that there was not a lot of immigration actually back in the 1990s and and so there was also not much change in voting behavior but but again since the mid-2000s immigration started to increase and this coincides very closely with the trend is the downward trend in voting votes for the social democrats okay so this is this if this is the picture we get when we look at europe uh western europe as a whole now let's dig a little deeper and look at 16 countries okay so what we have here is uh within country variation in uh the share of immigrants uh relative to or plotted against the the within country variation in the vote support for social democrats so one data point would say that let's say let's look at one particular data point this data point is the 2013 austrian election in that election social the immigration was five percentage points above the long run average at the same time vote support for the social democrats was five percentage points below the long run average okay so this is within country variation this essentially tells us whenever immigration increases this is this tends to be associated with a reduction in the fall of social democrat support interestingly if you look at data points before 2004 such a trend did not exist this is a recent trend that really is kicks in after 2005 and this may also explain why so many studies have mainly looked at the right-wing parties and not so much looked at social democrats or emphasized the impact on social democrats but recently this is the point i want to make it's uh it is very clearly visible in the data that that these immigration trends affect voting for social democrats very strongly okay now we can do the same thing for the right-wing party and not surprisingly we see that there's a positive relationship between increasing immigration and support for right-wing parties and if we take the two together then we see that the relationship is stronger among the social democrats than it is for the right-wing parties okay now we can do exactly the same thing not using immigration as an outcome but using the decline of the manufacturing sector as an outcome and we get pretty much the same picture okay again the social democrat if if there is manufacturing decline then social democrats lose votes if there is a manufacturing decline there's vote gains for the writing parties but the correlation between these two variables is strong among some social democrats than it is among uh the uh manufacturing decline in writing parties okay now we can do same thing for uh china trade and we would get a relationship that tells us more imports from china reduces support for social democrats it increases support for right-wing parties and if you take the two together we have a strong relationship between both again what the cross-country evidence shows us quite clearly is that social democracy strongly affects support for social democracy is strongly affected by the globalization trends the question is what happens if we dig even deeper and look at the fine level of original aggregation so we look at nuts three regions and we have in total 1038 regions again we look at eight 118 elections over the period 1990 to 2008. okay so this is this is just to show you the the that we have a fine a relatively fine high granularity of the original data and if you do here the again the correlation between within region variation in immigration and both support for social democrats and right-wing voters so these are pinned data points we have 100 percentiles okay each data point comprises like 40 or 50 data points then we get again pretty much the same picture that we saw before so this is immigration as an outcome this is manufacturing decline as an outcome here the relationship continues to be strong for social democrats and is somewhat weaker for uh for the right-wing parties now finally what we could not uh what we have not yet done is look at the impact of china import exposure into the full empirical analysis how this affected voting outcomes okay so this brings me to the conclusions okay so we started voting behavior invest in europe since 2004 social democrats over this period lost 25 million voters writing populist parties gained 7 million voters in this 16 western european countries we find that there's a significant association of globalization as measured by immigration and import competition with voting behavior globalization indicators and this is i think is interesting is more strongly correlated correlated with social democratic losses then it is correlated with right-wing populist party gains and this actually holds at every level of our aggregation that we looked at namely western europe as a whole across and within the 16 european countries that we have in our in our data and also within the more than thousand nuts three regions over time so my general conclusion is that of course it's all important to understand uh conditions under which voting outcomes are affected the political backlash after all is an expression of the dissatisfaction of the population with the status quo and we want to understand what makes people unhappy more specifically what we need to understand is how integration policies may reduce support for anti-immigration sentiment and anti-immigration platforms and also which redistributive policies are needed to address the economic problems that arise from globalization after all if you think about the economics then economies often advocate free trade precisely because free trade can be a parade to improving situation making the average individual better off and we if we appropriately redistribute then we don't have we do not need to have losers but actually this does not take place and a lot of people actually have lost from the globalization of their losses of the globalization process of course another question that arises from our research is what is precisely the reason why social democratic democratic losses were so strong of the least of the least in 10 to 15 years and particularly why are they so closely associated with globalization trends one reason this is just speculation may be that many social democratic parties have an internal conflict how to cope with globalization the immigration the question is one of this question but also how do you how should you deal with globalization in general think about the brexit and the labour party then another important evolution of course is that traditionally blue color works in the manufacturing were the typical social democratic voters and these voting base arose okay actually a recent uh interesting paper by tamar piketty also documents that social democratic voters have increasingly support been supported by the educational elite okay so this is uh something that happens in france but bkt shows this is also uh the case in the uk and the us and this may have uh uh kind of changed the way and the position of social democrats in the political landscape so i think these are very important questions that there will be a lot of debate in the future about it and i hope that my research has kind of convinced you that social democracy or loss of social democratic votes is something that we need to study more thank you very much thank you professor zweimeler for this very comprehensive presentation uh i have some very interesting questions already so don't hesitate to send me others there is this uh the kind lady who is collecting the questions in the orange t-shirt in italiano and problemi one question linked directly to your presentation is if the social democrats lost more votes than the right wing gained so where did the these difference of words go uh did some people stop voting uh did some uh some vote other parties like greens or others did you study this we have not yet very closely looked at that question but first of all the the narrative that can you can you hear me the narrative that what's going on here is that the gains of the right-wing votes is kind of equal to the losses of the establishment this does not seem to be true over the last 10 years okay this is very clearly this uh the losses of the social democrats were substantially larger than the gains of the right-wing parties so the question is what's uh what has been changing over this uh last 10 to 15 years i don't think that uh that the gains of the green parties are so important the the green parties have gained a lot of support in the very recent elections but if you go a couple of years back then the voting support for the greens has not been that dramatic this there was a shift also towards partly towards conservative and liberal parties one example would be the austrian case okay recently austria has the austrian conservative parties has changed the party leader and the guy was pretty successful and has has gained all the votes since he he came into power and yeah but this actually there's a lot of divergence across countries and probably the patterns are not this clear next question is immigration is a phenomenon of which is long term and they cannot be blocked so does this lead to the conclusion that also for long term we will be governed by the right wing hopefully not so um i guess the i mean an important question is how how do we cope with immigration do we find policies and integration policies that on the one hand kind of includes immigrants into the country and on the other hand makes natives not feel treated worse than than immigrants okay so much of of the anti-immigration sentiments if i talk to friends and and and other people many people perceive that immigrants when they come to the country they get access to social insurance benefits and especially if you know somebody or have maybe experienced yourself that it is kind of complicated to get access to these benefits then you don't understand this and these are these are stories that people tell each others and it suffices to have a few stories to have a lot of kind of anti-immigration sentiment coming with that but to to answer the question whether uh whether the kind of uh non-right-wing non-anti-immigration parties will be able to to cope with immigration will depend a lot whether they can come up with policies that kind of are able to address the problems arising is coming with immigration there is another question i find very interesting that maybe it's not only the question of chinese imports but that that are reducing the share of manufacturing but there's also automation for example there is also artificial intelligence will this have the same influence on right on a loss of social democratic vote and the the rise of the right uh actually there is uh i think in a parallel session there was a a presentation about exactly this question i mentioned uh two political italian political science kalantona and stannick who actually did also research on automation together with massimo and elephant bocconi and they actually find that right-wing support is driven by automation okay so again the identification strategy is to compare locations where there is a lot of implementation of automate of automation technologies compared to other locations where this is not and they find increasing support for right-wing parties in automation locations so i think this is again it's not only globalization it's also technology that affects the the labor market outcomes of workers differentially especially that brings low-skilled workers under pressure and also technological trends maybe may be contributing to to the voting trends that we see recently so let me let me put a few questions to you as a journalist asking to you uh to see the wider picture as as the economist if we go back to the 90s and if i remember first may demonstrations and speeches of trade unionists they said the world is unjust there's so many people who have less salary in the third world and they don't have industry and this is all unjust but does this now backfire onto those people who has been identifying the point that the world the distribution of riches in the world and of labor on manufacturing was not not equal but and now it seems as if as if the western world had some privilege until the 90s they had a manufacturing jobs that were very well paid because others did not have manufacturing is that a privilege that we are now losing and so that is now backfiring on social democrats yeah i think i i think the part of the problem of the decline of the manufacturing sector that or put differently the per se the manufacturing the decline of the manufacturing sector need do not doesn't need to be a problem per se the problem arises because if workers lose the job in the manufacturing sector they do not find a job of equal pay or equal quality in the services sector okay there's of course a lot of uh structural change going on and what for instance the u.s study by alder dornan hansen has shown is that the losses in the of workers in the manufacturing sectors are not compensated by gains in uh in in bridge gains in in the services sector and they also find that actually many workers draw unemployment benefits or disability benefits in the us and they kind of lose attachment to the labor force and uh the problem of the globe the problem of the structural change driven by the globalization process arises because there is because economies rich economies do not manage to bring these workers into equally uh well-paid jobs and in this sense i think it's true that many americans actually have lost the privilege of being a well-paid manufacturing worker lost and then they lost a job and did not find something of equal quality later on but maybe there is something that is a long-term goal of of ammunition of what international economists say you must be competitive you must be protective and you must invest in education and in qualification maybe this is a very long-term goal so it maybe loses out because if you have low-paid low-qualified workers who lose out against immigration one question could be to qualify them to invest more in qualifications so very interesting news from italy is that italy has a very big sector of premium products and they just this week had a presentation saying that in the next years we will need more than 200 000 qualified uh employees but we don't we don't find them so these are the luxury companies who are able to pay more and who are able to employ well-paid well-qualified people but they don't find them well i um i think this is the this is certainly a problem but i would say the problem is that we face on the labor market is not a labor demand problem in the sense that firms don't find the necessary workers it's the main problem is that workers many workers don't find adequate jobs and you know the education system is of course very important to help workers to find adequate jobs and it could also be and this would be actually an interesting question to study whether differential education systems affect these outcomes these long-run outcomes differentially for instance what i have in mind is the country where i'm currently working on in switzerland switzerland has invested a lot in education and has been able to cope with many big problems like the financial crisis or the huge appreciation of the swiss franc or the the the disproportionately large immigration and switzerland was able to kind of to be among the lowest unemployment countries in europe and also have very low wage inequality so summer switzerland has managed to have a relatively and relatively equal distribution of skills at the bottom of the skill distribution and i think this is very important if you think about a kind of uh also about uh kind of the dissatisfaction and voting outcomes of uh those kids so there's just a question on this uh regarding to switzerland what was the effect of immigration on the four-party system in in switzerland in switzerland we have the swiss people's party this is called this is classified here as a right-wing party probably the they are less radical than other writing parties and have been a kind of part of the political landscape already before the 1919 for the 1980s when kind of there was the switch towards anti-immigration policies in this party but switzerland is a special case in the sense that many vote at least important voting decisions are made in referenda and this direct democratic system is kind of creates a lot of inertia because it takes long time until the decisions have been made but it's also like a damocles word for politicians you know they it puts a lot of discipline on on politicians so because your career may be just destroyed if you if you kind of uh advocate something that eventually the the voters reject in a subsequent referendum and uh so yes is it how come that social democrats missed the development because they could have seen earlier is an interesting question how could they just stay with their opinions and with their policies and let it happen i'm not sure whether i have good answer this question i can't just you know something that what i think without you know having in a qualified way thought about this certainly having done research on my own but so what i just perceive when i talk to people in the social democratic party i mean there are a lot of traditions in that parties and and how kind of the power within the parties is divided and uh kind of that people with new ideas have it may have more problems to to to convince the entire or change the party direction then this is in in more in younger parties i don't know but is there also a tendency for shifts within uh uh social policy so does the shift mean uh shift from social democrats to writing parties also include a shift from uh well for from money of welfare for for the working generation to pensions so this i think this question implies that maybe right-wing workers are older yeah this is probably certain i would i would guess this is the case so it's for me it's kind of hard to make a clear statement um i think if i i remember the austrian case for instance so in austria it's older workers that support the social democrats and increasingly younger workers that vote for the or meet prime age workers that vote for the for the right-wing parties to the extent this is uh this is the case also in other countries which could be then the demographic there's important demographic dimension behind this voting support so another interesting question there was about the crisis if we had an economic crisis and that had some effects on the unemployment in general so would these electoral moves have happened if there would not have been this economic crisis which was not caused by a migration but had other reasons but did this have an independent effect this is actually something we want to study in more detail if you just look at the time series data then you see that after 2008 manufacturing decline has speeded up and this coincided with lots of voters for ripened parties so this kind of there seems something in the data this is that is kind of an order of magnitude larger than the other data points so after 2008 2009 2000 if you look at germany you have this eastern german regions like brandenburg and saxony where the right wing has gained the position of the of the most voted party a relative majority in the sense in the area which has little immigration and compared to 15 20 years ago relative economic success will have some pockets of unemployment but germany has been in the discussion for its economic surplus so it's suffering less than others from chinese imports how come that in such an area you have gains of a right wing you said saxony so i think it is important here and this will be we want to do in the future is to look at western europe because i think eastern europe is different social democracy in eastern europe is grew out of the former communist party so there's they have a different background maybe voting behavior is kind of different so this would also be of course the case if you look at other eastern european countries and this is why we decided to look at western europe okay now of course in in eastern germany so what we see is kind of a very very strong anti-immigration sentiment despite the fact that there are very few immigrants there okay also this this is a situation that you have also in many other eastern european countries slovakia or the czech republic they talk a lot about in the election campaigns about immigration although there are almost any immigrants in the country and so this is kind of uh this we do not tackle this in our research project but this is of course something uh to say this is to say that the relationship in eastern european countries with the different economic history the different political history of these countries and the lack of democratic experience of course at the same time may kind of generate a voting behavior that is not directly comparable to what we see in western europe especially if you talk about the social support for social democracy let's come to a final evaluation if you were to give an advice to a social democratic politician in western europe would it be interesting to say something like yes you must be you must keep reforming for more productive and competitive economy for having better educated local workers who are then able to gain higher wages and have access to a segment of the labor market which is more qualified and which has less competition from immigrants is that a solution is that the solution or are there other solutions is there no solution well i'm not a politician so i don't really but i i think education is a key question and kind of making sure that the potential loses from the globalization process have the chance to kind of free train or get qualifications that makes them fit for the labor market i think this is something very important but i think also that this is not about only about education not only about the labor market it's also very much about you know bringing people together and kind of design integration policies or foster integration at the local level that increases interaction between natives and immigrants this is for instance think about housing if housing is very concentrated if in in the ethic dimension then there will not be much interaction okay or think about schools yeah are kids distributed immigrant kids distributed equally across schools or some native kids that are that have more than 50 percent of immigrant kids that don't speak the native language this is something that you hear in certain locations this is a big problem and i think this these issues need to be tackled uh and here i think this social democrats would have a kind of an area where where they could improve probably so thank you for your questions thank you for your uh for our young assistant in the in our hall and thank you professor twaimullah thank you okay thank you very much you