From the Fringe to the front-stage. European immigration and the Far-Right vote: An IV approach

Abstract

We use regional data spanning over 4500 electoral outcomes at NUTS3 level between 2000 and 2017 to assess the impact of immigration on Western European Far-Right voting. To deal with potential reverse causation, we use immigration in neighboring countries as an instrument for domestic immigration. The estimated effects of immigration are positive, significant and larger compared to those obtained by simple OLS and fixed effects regressions. Depending on the measure of immigration used, we find that a 1% increase in immigration stocks leads to a between 1.78% and 2.97% in Far-Right voting. Similar results are obtained using electoral outcomes and immigration shares at the NUTS2 level, where the effect of immigration is estimated between 3% and 5.32%. Our results are consistent with possible negative feedback from the Far-Right to immigration. Our estimated effects explain a large part of the observed rise in Far-Right in Western European countries that experienced high levels of immigration during the span of our sample.