The Refugee Next Door: Explaining Radical Right Voting with Inter-group Exposure

• In Event: Mini-Conference on Politics in Post-industrial Societies V: Old and New Grievances and the Rising Appeal of Radical Parties

Abstract

The arrival of 800,000 refugees in Germany in 2015 is widely believed to have played a decisive role in the German national elections of 2017 and has since shaped the public debate about immigration and the acceptance of refugees. Hitherto, there are however only very few studies that provide empirical evidence on how the exposure to refugees influences natives’ voting behaviour and whether this electorally favours radical right parties. This paper tests whether the variance in exposure to refugees explains radical right vote choice. Using a novel and original dataset, I exploit the large spatial variation in locations of ad-hoc established refugee mass accommodations to measure the exposure of German voters to refugees on the unprecedently granular resolution of each residential street. As refugees and natives move within the spatial network of streets, I model the probability of regular encounter of these two groups for every electoral precinct in different elections using spatial network centralities as reliable proxies for human movement potential for a selection of German regions and Länder.

Authors

• Julia Leschke, European University Institute

• Kimon Krenz, University College London