Abstract
Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel support for extreme-right parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little—and sometimes conflicting—evidence with which to assess the impact of a large influx of refugees on natives’ political attitudes and behavior. We provide causal evidence from a natural experiment in Greece, where some Aegean islands close to the Turkish border experienced sudden and drastic increases in the number of Syrian refugees while other islands slightly farther away—but with otherwise similar institutional and socioeconomic characteristics—did not. Placebo tests suggest that precrisis trends in vote shares for exposed and nonexposed islands were virtually identical. This allows us to obtain unbiased estimates of the electoral consequences of the refugee crisis. Our study shows that among islands that faced a massive but transient inflow of refugees passing through just before the September 2015 election, vote shares for Golden Dawn, the most extreme-right party in Europe, moderately increased by 2 percentage points (a 44 percent increase at the average). The finding that mere exposure to the refugee crisis is sufficient to fuel support for extreme-right parties has important implications for our theoretical understanding of the drivers of antirefugee backlash.
Highlights
Countries across the globe are struggling to cope with the most severe refugee crisis since the aftermath of World War II
We find that townships receiving refugees see an increase in the Golden Dawn (GD) vote share by slightly more than 2 percentage points compared to townships that were not exposed to refugee arrivals
This study exploits a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea to examine the effect of exposure to the refugee crisis on natives’ support for extreme-right parties
Summary
Greece received about 400,000 new asylum seekers between April 2015 and September 2015 (UNHCR 2016), which translates to more than 2.8 refugees per Greek resident in affected islands These sudden inflows reached their first peak just before the September 2015 election, thereby ensuring that the refugee crisis would be a highly salient issue when island residents cast their vote in the midst of the concurrent financial and economic crisis. The results suggest that this sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals fueled support for the radical anti-immigrant and anti-asylum-seeker party Golden Dawn (GD), but only moderately so: vote shares for GD increased about 2 percentage points (a 44 percent increase at the average) because of the exposure to the refugee crisis This increase in vote shares, is statistically significant and substantively meaningful.
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