Abstract
As a result of the 2015 refugee crisis, a substantial number of voters experienced a sudden and unexpected influx of asylum seekers in their neighbourhood in the Netherlands. We examined whether and why local exposure to asylum seekers leads to more support for the radical right (i.e. PVV). Our analyses are based on a longitudinal individual-level panel dataset including more than 19,000 respondents (1VOP) who were interviewed just before and shortly after the height of the refugee crisis. We enriched this dataset with detailed information about where asylum seekers were housed from the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers. Our empirical study resembles a natural experiment, because some residents experienced an increase in exposure to asylum seekers but similar residents did not. PVV support increased during the refugee crisis and especially among residents who became more exposed to asylum seekers in their neighbourhood.
Highlights
An unprecedented refugee crisis unfolded in Europe over the course of 2015, which brought about political turmoil in many countries
Among voters who changed their support for the PVV, voters are far more likely to have voted for the PVV in wave 2 compared to wave 1: among the switchers, 75.88% voted for the PVV in wave 2 (Table 1)
This illustrates that the 2015 refugee crisis was the biggest refugee crisis the Netherlands experienced in recent history, only a relatively small percentage of voters became directly exposed to asylum seekers in their local neighbourhood environment
Summary
An unprecedented refugee crisis unfolded in Europe over the course of 2015, which brought about political turmoil in many countries. As some people witnessed an influx of asylum seekers in their residential neighbourhood, while others did not, the 2015 European refugee crisis is an interesting case to study the impact of local demographic changes on voting intensions for the radical right. In 2015, the twenty-eight member states of the European Union together with Norway and Switzerland received more than 1.3 million applications from asylum seekers [1]. This has been, by far, the highest annual number of asylum seekers recorded in Europe since World War II [2]. The Dutch people made their voice heard, both in support of and in opposition
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