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

Abstract

We investigate the effect of the refugee inflow between 2014 and 2017 on the electoral support for far-right parties in the 2017 German federal election. Leveraging unique, fine-grained data, we differentiate between the impact of refugee inflow at two distinct geographic scales: the immediate neighborhood (1km x 1km) and the county level. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we employ past settlement patterns as instrumental variables. Our results reveal noteworthy variations across geographic scales and regions. We find that refugee inflows lead to an increase in far-right vote shares at the county level, while we observe a negative but statistically insignificant effect at the grid cell level. This negative neighborhood effect attains statistical significance in West Germany, particularly in urban counties, aligning with the contact hypothesis. We find no significant effect in rural areas, and a positive impact of the inflow rate at the county level in West Germany, suggesting a contrasting effect beyond the immediate local vicinity. Despite the fact that support for far-right parties is most pronounced in East Germany, our analysis does not yield robust evidence of a statistically significant relationship in this region.