Becoming neighbors with refugees and voting for the far-right? The impact of refugee inflows at the small-scale level

Melinda Fremerey, Lukas Hörnig and Sandra Schaffner

No 387, DICE Discussion Papers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE)

Abstract: We investigate the effect of the refugee inflow between 2014 and 2017 on voting for the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the national parliamentary election in 2017 in Germany. Drawing on unique small-scale data enables us to distinguish between the contact theory, captured by the inflow of refugees into the immediate neighborhood (1km x 1km), and county-level (NUTS 3) effects, which might pick-up other, broader factors such as media coverage or specific county-level policies. We alleviate concerns of an endogenous refugee allocation by a shift-share instrument. Our results indicate that the contact theory is valid in urban West Germany, i. e., higher refugee inflows in West German urban neighborhoods decrease the shares of far-right voting, while there is no robust evidence of a relationship between refugee inflow and far-right vote shares in East Germany and rural West Germany.

Keywords: voting behavior; neighborhood characteristics; refugees; immigration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur, nep-mig, nep-pol and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Becoming neighbors with refugees and voting for the far-right? The impact of refugee inflows at the small-scale level (2024)
Working Paper: Becoming neighbors with refugees and voting for the far-right? The impact of refugee inflows at the small-scale level (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:dicedp:387

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