Immigrant voting patterns in Canada : reciprocity, political socialization and interests across immigrant subgroups

Despite immigrants’ growing influence on electoral outcomes in Canada, standard models of voting (and partisanship) do not account for immigrant-specific determinants of voting. This paper builds on these models by exploring immigrant-specific short- and long-term factors that affect voting namely, their pre-migration political socialization, early experiences as well as ongoing experiences in Canada. Using Canadian Election Studies data from 1965 to 2021 and a series of binary logistic regression models with multiple covariates, I find that immigrants from Europe, the US and Australia resemble the voting preferences of Canadian-born voters while those from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East disproportionately support the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC). Across immigrant generations, I find that adult and adolescent immigrants are also more likely to support the LPC relative to school-age and young children immigrants who experienced most of their political socialization in Canada. I do not find evidence the immigrants support the LPC out of gratitude for their admission as I found no evidence of any association between entering under a Liberal government and support for the LPC. In contrast, I find that immigrants who identify with a racialized ethnicity are also more likely to support the LPC compared to non-racialized immigrants. These findings contribute to existing knowledge by showing that some determinants of voting are uniquely relevant to voting preference formation of immigrants in Canada.