Exposure to Refugees and Voting for the Far-Right: (Unexpected) Results from Austria

Andreas Steinmayr

No 9790, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper studies a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of exposure to refugees in the neighborhood on the support for far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration parties. In the state elections in an Austrian state in September 2015 the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPOE) doubled its vote share with a fierce anti-asylum campaign. Since only 42 percent of communities hosted refugees at the time of the election, exposure to refugees varied at the local level. To account for the potential endogeneity in the distribution of refugees, I use pre-existing group accommodations as instrumental variable. To cope with the sudden inflow of large numbers of refugees, these buildings were used to accommodate refugees and thus strongly increase the probability of refugee presence in a community. In line with the contact hypothesis I find that hosting refugees dampens the overall trend and decreases FPOE support by 4.42 percentage points. Further analysis using exit poll data reveals a positive effect on the optimism in the population that the integration of refugees can be managed. Placebo tests show that there were no effects in elections prior to 2015.

Keywords: political economy; refugees; immigration; voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J15 K37 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mig and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (104)

Published - published as 'Contact versus Exposure: Refugee Presence and Voting for the Far-Right' in: Review of Economics and Statistics, 2021, 103 (2), 310–327

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Related works:
Working Paper: Exposure to Refugees and Voting for the Far-Right. (Unexpected) Results from Austria (2016)
Working Paper: Exposure to Refugees and Voting for the Far-Right. (Unexpected) Results from Austria (2016)
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