CP Workshop – Dominik Hangartner, London School of Economics

DateFebruary 27, 2017

Time12:30pm to 2:00pm

Location
4357 Bunche Hall

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Abstract:Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel anti-immigrant sentiment among natives and increase voting for extreme-right parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little, and sometimes conflicting, evidence with which to assess the impact of a sudden and large influx of refugees on natives’ political attitudes and behavior. We provide new causal evidence from a natural experiment in Greece, where some Aegean islands close to the Turkish border have experienced drastic increases in the number of Syrian and Iraqi refugees while other islands slightly farther away—but with otherwise similar institutional and socioeconomic characteristics—did not. Placebo tests suggest that pre-crisis trends in vote shares for exposed and non-exposed islands were virtually identical. This allows us to obtain unbiased estimates of the electoral consequences of the refugee crisis. Our study shows that among islands that faced a large inflow of refugees, vote shares for Golden Dawn, the most extreme-right party in Europe, increased by 2 percentage points (a more than 40 percent increase at the average). This increase came at the expense of the main center-right party and by mobilizing additional voters. Our findings have implications for the theoretical understanding of the drivers of anti-immigrant sentiment and for the management of refugee flows.  

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