Refugee-exposure and Right-wing Support: Eastern Germany After the Refugee Crisis

• In Event: The Politics of Asylum Seekers and Refugees

Abstract

How does the allocation of refugees affect attitudes and behavior towards them and immigrants more generally, especially in regions where previous exposure was minimal? Between 2015 and 2017, 3.1 million refugees arrived on European shores, nearly half of which (44%) applied for asylum in Germany (Eurostat 2018). The unprecedented inflow put the German asylum system under strain and required the re-distribution of refugees to localities that had never hosted substantial numbers of foreigners before. This paper exploits the quasi-random allocation of refugees to study the effect of first-time, local exposure to foreigners. Our study investigates a context that is fairly common, politically important, but rarely studied: the rural hinterlands of a country, where the presence of foreigners is minimal, and anti-immigrant sentiments on the rise (Golder 2016). This characterizes large stretches of central, eastern and southern Europe and much of the rural hinterlands of the US. Our study area is no exception: between the beginning of the refugee crisis in 2015 and our data collection in 2018, support for Germany’s anti-immigrant party AfD surged from 6% to 16% nationwide, and from 7% to 27% in Eastern Germany (Infratest dimap 2018). How much of this shift can be attributed to the arrival of foreigners in people’s hometowns?

To answer these questions we draw on an original data collected among 1,320 individuals from 236 closely-matched municipalities in Eastern Germany, half of which received refugees. Most of these are rural municipalities or small towns, in which the share of foreigners in the population was less than 1.5% before 2015. Causal identification relies on a policy that allocates refugees following strict administrative rules, which we combine with a matching design that provides us with a sample of statistically indistinguishable treatment and control municipalities. We analyze a diverse set of outcomes ranging from voting behavior, over attitudes towards immigrants and refugees to behavioral bias as displayed in economic games. Our survey and behavioral measures show widespread anti-immigrant sentiments, but these are entirely unaffected by the presence of refugees in their hometowns. Instead, we record null effects on every measure of right-wing support. If anything, local exposure to refugees served as a ‘reality check’, pulling both right- and left-leaning individuals more towards the center.

We interpret our findings as broadly supporting the sociotropic view of immigration concerns (Sniderman et al. 2004; Hainmueller and Hiscox 2010; Dancygier and Donelly 2015; Valentino et al. 2017). he situation of individual refugees hosted in their communities is not what respondents are reacting to. Nor are they resentful of specific individuals they encounter. Individuals in our study area, it appears, have not become more anti-immigrant, but anti-immigration. Ideas about policy dominate local experience.

Authors

• Max Schaub, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)

• Johanna Gereke, Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES)

• Delia Baldassarri, New York University