Far-right mass protests and their effects on internal migration

Enzo Brox and Tommy Krieger

No 25-045, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We study how far-right mass rallies affect people's views about a city and thus location choices of nationals. To this end, we first exploit that the city of Dresden (Germany) unexpectedly experienced such rallies at the turn of the year 2014/15. Results from dyadic difference-in-differences and Synthetic Control analyses suggest that the number of (young) German adults who moved from another region to Dresden declined by around 10% due to the far-right mass protests. We complement our first analysis with a conjoint experiment where participants decide between two hypothetical cities. This experiment confirms that far-right rallies have a dissuasive effect and shows that left-wing people react stronger than right-wing people. It also reveals that far-right protests cause security concerns and concerns about finding like-minded people. The latter reaction is only observed for people that do not support the far right.

Keywords: far-right movements; location decisions; internal migration; political protest; populism; regional competition for talent; reputation of cities; university students (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 I23 O15 P00 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-mig and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:327113

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