The Effect of Far Right Parties on the Location Choice of Immigrants: Evidence from Lega Nord Mayors

Emanuele Bracco, Maria De Paola (), Colin Green () and Vincenzo Scoppa ()

No 156985061, Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department

Abstract: Immigration has increasingly taken centre-stage in the political landscape. Part of this has been rise in far-right, anti-immigration parties in a range of countries. Existing evidence suggests that the presence of immigrants has a substantial effect on the political views of the electorate, generating an advantage to these parties with anti-immigration or nationalist platforms. This paper explores a closely related issue but overlooked issue: how immigrant behavior is influenced by these parties. We focus on immigrant location decisions in Northern Italy which has seen the rise of the anti-immigration party Lega Nord. We construct a dataset of mayoral elections in Italy for the years 2002-2014, and calculate the effect of electing a mayor belonging to, or supported by Lega Nord. To identify this relationship we focus on mayors who have been elected with narrow margins of victory in a Regression Discontinuity framework. The election of Lega Nord mayor discourages immigrants from moving into the municipality.

Keywords: Immigration; Geographical Mobility; Voting Behavior; Political economy; Regression Discontinuity Design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J15 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur, nep-mig, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-univers ... casterWP2017_007.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The effect of far right parties on the location choice of immigrants: Evidence from Lega Nord Mayors (2018)
Working Paper: THE EFFECT OF FAR RIGHT PARTIES ON THE LOCATION CHOICE OF IMMIGRANTS: EVIDENCE FROM LEGA NORD MAYORS (2017)
Working Paper: The Effect of Far Right Parties on the Location Choice of Immigrants: Evidence from Lega Nord Mayors (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:lan:wpaper:156985061

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Motta ().