Exposure to the refugee crisis increases support for extreme right parties

• In Event: The Political Repercussions of Immigration

Abstract

Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel anti-immigrant sentiment among natives and increase voting for extreme right-wing parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little, and sometimes conflicting, evidence that assesses 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 further away—but with otherwise similar institutional and socio-economic characteristics—did not. Placebo tests suggest that pre-treatment vote shares for exposed and non-exposed islands were very similar. This allows us to obtain unbiased estimates of the electoral consequences of exposure to the refugee crisis. Our study shows that for islands that faced a large inflow of refugees, vote shares for Golden Dawn, the most extreme right-wing party in Europe, increased by 44 percent, at the expense of the center-right party.

Authors

• Elias Dinas, University of Oxford

• Konstantinos Matakos, King's College London

• Dominik Hangartner, London School of Economics

• Dimitrios Xefteris