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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Comparative Governance
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1360265
This article is part of the Research Topic Populism and the Border: Theoretically and Empirically Dissecting Strategies of Exclusion and the Recreation of Identities View all articles

It's because of the cross-border commuters: Opposing the free movement of persons in the Swiss borderlands with the European Union

Provisionally accepted
Laurent Bernhard Laurent Bernhard 1*Lukas Lauener Lukas Lauener 2
  • 1 University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland
  • 2 Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Scholarly work on populism and borders have largely followed separate paths so far. This article aims at bringing together these two strands by means of an empirical analysis of individual attitudes on a re-bordering policy in the context of a national-populist mobilization against the free movement of persons. Recent contributions on border regions in affluent countries have highlighted an increased opposition to European integration that is fueled by political actors from the populist radical right. We hypothesize that border residents are more opposed to the free movement of persons than non-border residents the more they are exposed to the influx of cross-border workers. The empirical analysis draws on a representative postvote survey from the so-called 'VOTO studies' on a popular initiative by the radical right that demanded Switzerland's termination of the free movement of persons with the European Union in 2020. In line with our hypothesis, we find a significant positive interaction between border residence and the share of cross-border commuters on the likelihood to vote in favor of this proposition. While border residence turns out to be insufficient to foster increased re-bordering attitudes, we show that the magnitude of incoming cross-border commuters makes a difference.

    Keywords: Borders, Direct democracy, European Union, Free movement of persons, populism, radical right, Switzerland

    Received: 22 Dec 2023; Accepted: 25 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Bernhard and Lauener. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Laurent Bernhard, University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

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