Elite Influence on Receptiveness to Refugee Hosting

• In Event: Experiments in Elite Behavior

Abstract

Local politics, in theory, provide citizens with more direct control over matters that affect their daily lives. Local politics can be a driver of responsiveness and thus a cornerstone of a functioning democracy. It however remains unclear to what extent local leaders are responsive to local demands as opposed to party ideology. This is primarily a problem of causal identification as it is difficult to disentangle whether local public opinion follows elite queues or whether local elites respond to them. Further, very localised public opinion is usually unavailable. If hypotheses on political independence are true, we should observe policy choices of independent local governments that are distinct from those that have a national affiliation and are thus bound to respond to more national-level concerns. We circumvent this problem using the choice of municipal governments in Italy to support applications to host asylum seekers in their communities. Using a regression discontinuity design on newly collected data on local tenders from 2003-2020 and combining it with local election data, we estimate the effect of political independence on supporting pro-migration policies at a local level. To further disentangle effects of ideology from those of political independence, we compare right-wing independent local governments with nationally affiliated right-wing parties. We discuss the implications of these findings for political independence and the role of ideology on policy responsiveness and the quality of democracy.

Authors

• Francesco Colombo, European University Institute

• Annabelle Wittels, European University Institute