Democratic Involvement and Immigrants' Compliance with the Law

Michaela Slotwinski, Alois Stutzer and Cédric Gorinas ()

No 10550, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Many people are concerned about societal cohesion in the face of higher numbers of foreigners migrating to Western democracies. The challenge for the future is to find and adopt institutions that foster integration. We investigate how the right to vote in local elections affects immigrants' compliance with the law. In our study for Denmark, we exploit an institutional regulation that grants foreigners local voting rights after three years of stay. Relying on register data, we find causal evidence that the first possibility to vote considerably reduces the number of legal offenses of non-Western male immigrants in the time after elections.

Keywords: migration; voting rights; immigrant integration; crime; RDD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 J15 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2017-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law, nep-mig and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10550.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Democratic Involvement and Immigrants’ Compliance with the Law (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10550

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().