Abstract
Across Europe, far-right parties have made significant electoral gains in recent years. Their anti-immigration stance is considered one of the main factors behind their success. Using data from Finland, this paper studies the effect of immigration on voting for the far-right Finns Party on a local level. Exploiting a convenient setup for a shift-share instrument, I find that a 1 percentage point increase in the share of foreign citizens in a municipality decreases the Finns Party’s vote share by 3.4 percentage points. Placebo tests using pre-period data confirm this effect is not driven by persistent trends at the municipality level. The far-right votes lost to immigration are captured by the two pro-immigration parties. Turning to potential mechanisms, immigration is found to increase voter turnout, potentially activating local pro-immigration voters. Moreover, the negative effect is only present in municipalities with high initial exposure to immigrants, consistent with the intergroup contact theory. Finally, I also provide some evidence for the welfare-state channel as a plausible mechanism behind the main result.
Highlights
The popularity of far-right1 parties across Europe has been rising rapidly in recent years
Using data from Finland, this paper studies the effect of immigration on voting for the far-right Finns Party on a local level
This study focuses on Finland, a country that had a single far-right party for nearly 25 years (1995–2017) but was long considered immune to the surge of the far-right seen in other European countries (Ellinas 2010; Goodwin 2008; Ignazi 2003)
Summary
The popularity of far-right (sometimes referred to as populist radical right) parties across Europe has been rising rapidly in recent years. Recent years saw a large inflow of asylum seekers from Asia and Africa fueled by a number of armed conflicts. Both of these immigration shocks likely kindled anti-immigrant sentiments across the continent, contributing to an unprecedented wave of electoral success among far-right parties. In June 2017, following the election of new a chairman, Jussi Halla-aho, the party split into two: the Blue Reform remained in the coalition government while the Finns Party went into opposition.. The following description applies to the period of the Finns Party’s uniform existence
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