Control and Fairness: What Determines Elected Local Leaders’ Support for Hosting Refugees in Their Community?

Abstract

When it comes to successful refugee reception, the local level matters. Research overwhelmingly examines host communities’ attitudes, but endorsement from local politicians is equally important to resolving conflicts and facilitating harmonious interaction. Yet the preferences of local leaders and their willingness to support the resettlement process are understudied. We conduct the first-ever conjoint experiment on a representative sample of local elected leaders in Greece, a heavily affected country with many active host sites. We elicit elite preferences regarding refugee resettlement and find that local leaders are more likely to support it if they are involved in the process and can control the frequency and intensity of local-refugee interactions. Overall, our results suggest that processes enabling elites to control “exposure,” when combined with fair-share allocations schemes, can facilitate future resettlement. Such processes, however, introduce new humanitarian concerns and debates about refugee mobility.