No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Immigration and Voting for the Far Right
Abstract
Does the presence of immigrants in one's neighborhood affect voting for far right-wing parties? We study the case of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) that, under the leadership of Jörg Haider, increased its vote share from less than 5% in the early 1980s to 27% by the end of the 1990s and continued to attract more than 20% of voters in the 2013 national election. We find that the inflow of immigrants into a community has a significant impact on the increase in the community's voting share for the FPÖ, explaining roughly a tenth of the regional variation in vote changes. Our results suggest that voters worry about adverse labor market effects of immigration, as well as about the quality of their neighborhood. In fact, we find evidence of a negative impact of immigration on “compositional amenities”. In communities with larger immigration influx, Austrian children commute longer distances to school, and fewer daycare resources are provided. We do not find evidence that Austrians move out of communities with increasing immigrant presence. (JEL: P16, J61)
... However, most research is focused on Western European countries that have been exposed to immigration from culturally distant regions for a longer period of time (see also Dustmann et al., 2019;Halla et al., 2017;Otto & Steinhardt, 2014;Steinmayr, 2016) and PRRPs in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) remain understudied (for notable exceptions, see Bustikova, 2018Bustikova, , 2020Santana et al., 2020), notwithstanding that the upswing of the radical right in CEE has been considerable. Lizotte (2019) calls for the need to study populism contextually as current geographical work on right-wing populism is rather scant, episodic and focused predominantly on highly visible manifestations of contemporary populist movements (e.g., Brexit and Donald Trump's victory in 2016), thus omitting the majority of populist upsurge events. ...
... The group threat theory might be defined as an 'anticipation of negative consequences' (Stephan & Renfro, 2002, p. 197; see also Quillian, 1995;Schlueter & Scheepers, 2010) originating from both the real and perceived presence of immigrants, and it represents a frequently employed hypothesis regarding the regional differences of natives' anti-immigrant attitudes (Teney, 2012). Contextual variations of the group threat hypothesis in relation to votes for anti-immigrant parties and policies are generally confirmed in several Western European countries (Barone et al., 2016;Dustmann et al., 2019;Halla et al., 2017;Otto & Steinhardt, 2014). ...
... Out of six models in total, only the 2017 MGWR model indicated considerable clustering of positive coefficients, suggesting the group threat concept possibly plays a role in the eastern half of the country. Scholars analysing the relationship between actual immigration and support for anti-immigrant parties have previously confirmed (e.g., Halla et al., 2017;Otto & Steinhardt, 2014;Vasilakis, 2017) and equally rejected (e.g., Bahna & Zagrapan, 2020;Steinmayr, 2016;Teney, 2012) variations of the group threat hypothesis. Such ambivalence of prior research and inconsistent results in our models make us hesitant to convincingly confirm or reject any variation of either the group threat or intergroup contact theory, especially given the 2021 MGWR results, where the potential group threat effect fades off entirely. ...
Although there has been a considerable amount of new research examining the recent upsurge of populist radical right parties, Central and Eastern European countries remain understudied, and the importance of geographical context and spatial scales are often overlooked in the field of political science. This leads to limited understanding of contemporary nativist manifestations across diverse European environments. Our study partially fills these gaps by analysing the main Czech populist radical right party, Freedom and Direct Democracy. To further elaborate upon various contextual effects, spatial processes and spatial non-stationarity of data, we compare the results of four statistical methods (OLS, LISA, GWR, MGWR). Accordingly, we demonstrate the limitations of global models and the added value of employing multiscale and geographically weighted models. Although various relationships between analysed variables that drive nativist manifestations across Czech regions are identified and discussed, we conclude that the most vital factor regarding populist radical right voting in Czechia is education followed by religiosity.
... Steinmayr (2021), Halla et al. (2017), Madestam et al. (2013)). Given the literature, its eect is ambiguous. ...
... (2019), Halla et al. (2017)). ...
... ties, aecting ballot outcomes.Since young people represent an important target group of the democrats, we expect a negative eect of this variable controlling for the county's shape of the age distribution(Rodríguez-Pose et al. (2021), Steinmayr (2021),Autor et al. (2020),Halla et al. (2017),Mendez & Cutillas (2014)). Since young people are generally more mobile than older generations (e.g. ...
In this paper we investigate the effect of Donald Trump's campaign for coal in his successful race for the White House in 2016. Using a spatial Durbin model we estimate the effect of coal production on the Republicans vote share in the US Presidential Election of 2016 on the county level. To avoid biased estimates we take spillover effects into account and use spatial clustering. We find a significant positive effect. The effect becomes even more pronounced when we use the vote-share difference between Mitt Romney in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016 as the dependent variable. The positive effect of coal production on the Republican vote share are retained after allowing for non-linear effects of coal production and using coal production per worker and per working hours as main explanatory variable. JEL-Codes: D720, P160, P180, R110.
... There has been a growth in populist votes, which can be explained by the fact that some citizens feel that they are not understood by the elected politicians or even feel marginalized in society (Van Hauwaert & Van Kessel, 2018). In addition, many studies have suggested that most of the people who vote for populist (especially extreme right-wing) parties live in areas where the number of immigrants is higher than in other cities (Halla et al., 2017;Ivaldi, 2019). Obviously, beyond the "classic" explanations suggested by researchers in sociology and political science, other determinants, often spatial ones, have been put forward, notably by geographers, through what is known as ecological analyses (Forest, 2018). ...
... Specifically, studies have shown that the issue of immigration has historically been put forward by extreme right-wing parties to stir their voters' sense of national identity (Halla et al., 2017; Paper accepted in JOURNAL OF REGIONAL SCIENCE Stavrakakis et al., 2017). In the French case, Ivaldi (2019) explains that while Rassemblement National fuels voters' growing fears about immigration, La France Insoumise advocates the defense of immigrants' and minorities' rights in French society. ...
The rise of a geography of discontent highlighted in recent studies points to a strong association between voting for populist parties and territories with socioeconomic difficulties. While discontent has primarily been addressed through the analysis of populist votes, we provide additional elements of analysis by comparing these populist votes to the Yellow Vest movement, and we distinguish the populist votes coming from the far-left party from those coming from the far-right party. Our results show that the Yellow Vest movement cannot be confused with French populist supporters and that their sensitivity to territorial dimensions also differs from that of the latter, especially in terms of access to public services. Their behavior highlights that the geography of protest takes multiple shapes and cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between urban and mostly rural or peripheral areas. This raises serious concerns about the dynamics of territories and the deleterious effects of metropolization and the closure of public services in peri-urban and rural territories that are not specific to France.
... Bolet (2020) shows that 'under local conditions of material deprivation, measured by the local unemployment rate', the effect of immigration inflows on municipalities' far-right vote share is 'amplified'. Halla, Wagner, and Zweimüller (2017) and Barone et al. (2016) reach similar findings in Austria and Italy, explaining locals' increased hostility towards newcomers in worse-off areas as an effect of an increased labour market competition. Conversely, Lonsky (2021) provides evidence for an opposite effect, arguably due to 'the distributional effect of immigration through transfers and taxes', meaning that in areas characterised by high levels of unskilled immigration and a redistributive tax system, 'political support for immigration tends to decrease with individual income' (Otto and Steinhardt 2014, 68). ...
... Few studies also examine noneconomic determinants of individual attitudes on immigration, including into the analysis data on xenophobic feelings (Otto and Steinhardt 2014), religious diversity (Barone et al. 2016) and local increases of foreign children (Otto and Steinhardt 2014;Halla, Wagner, and Zweimüller 2017), which are expected to foster far-right votes due to locals' concerns about compositional changes in kindergartens and schools. ...
This article analyses the impact of exposure to asylum-seeking migration during the European ‘refugee crisis’ on votes for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland at the 2019 European elections in Berlin. While other scholars investigated the relationship between locals’ exposure to asylum-seekers and far-right voting, we analyse this relationship at a very small scale (electoral district level), adopting an innovative methodological approach, based on geo-localization techniques and high-resolution spatial statistics. Furthermore, we assess the impact on this relationship of some previously neglected variables. Through spatial regression models, we show that exposure to asylum-seeking migration is negatively correlated with AfD vote shares, which provides support for so-called ‘contact theory’ and that the relationship is stronger in better-off districts. Remarkably, the relationship is weaker in districts containing bigger reception centres, which suggests that the effects of asylum-seeking migration depend on the perceived contact intensity (and, therefore, a moderating effect of reception centre size). Finally, the effects of districts’ socio-economic deprivation on the relationship between exposure to asylum-seeking migration and AfD vote shares is different in districts located in former East and West Berlin, which suggests an effect of socio-cultural history on the relationship between exposure to migration and far-right voting.
... In an early contribution, Otto and Steinhardt (2014) found an increase in the vote for far-right parties in areas of Hamburg which experienced a higher inflow of immigrants and refugees. Barone et al. (2016), Halla et al. (2017) and Edo et al. (2019) looking respectively at the Italian, Austrian and French experiences uncovered similar results. Additionally, Fieldhouse et al. (2019) argues that the increased saliency of immigration after the enlargement is positively associated with an increase in Euroscepticism and in UKIP's support in the UK. ...
... Similarly Barone et al. (2016) finds that Italian municipalities more exposed to immigration saw an increase in the vote share of centerright coalition parties in the national elections. Halla et al. (2017) shows that the arrival of immigrants in Austria increased the vote share of the farright movement FPO. Edo et al. (2019) finds that the increase in immigration from Northern African countries caused an increase in Le Pen's vote share in the French Presidential elections between 1988 and 2012. ...
The aim of this thesis is to study the causal effect of massive migration waves on political attitudes and voting. I show in particular how large inflows of migrants were able to shape both attitudes and elections historically and also in more recent periods. The first chapter shows that the arrival of immigrants from Eastern European countries after the European enlargement caused an increase in Euroscepticism in Great Britain. The second chapter studies instead, how an important wave of forced migration was able to shape both electoral outcomes and party strategy in 1960s France. In the third chapter, I focus my attention on a different topic: the political effect of the Labour's economic response to the financial crisis. I show that areas that are likely to have benefited from Labour's policies after the crisis, started to vote more favourably for the Labour party.
... 1 Moreover, relative disadvantages due to unequal opportunities are not only prevalent among children with lower socio-economic status, but also among immigrants, who are often confronted with unequal opportunities from the start (see e.g., Schnepf, 2007). In recent years, this social group has been under scrutiny in the U.S. and in some European countries, because of the immigration waves between 2014 and 2017, which have, in several elections, shifted political support toward right-wing and conservative parties (Otto & Steinhardt, 2014;Halla, Wagner, & Zweimüller, 2017;Davis & Deole, 2018). Such parties typically exhibit preferences for lower social transfers compared to social-democratic parties (Esping-Andersen, 1990;Fuller, Alston, & Vaughan, 1995). ...
... From the post-estimation Wald test reported in row four, we can deduce that left-wing dictators also transfer statistically significantly more to out-group members than those who identify themselves as right-wing. This result could indicate a solidarity with immigrants to Germany by leftist native dictators and reflects results, which show that political preferences are linked to attitudes toward the welfare state and increasingly toward social groups (De Vries, Hakhverdian, & Lancee, 2013;Otto & Steinhardt, 2014;Halla et al., 2017;Edo, Giesing, Ö ztunc, & Poutvaara, 2019). For immigrant dictators Among immigrants we do not find any association between political preferences and transfer decisions. ...
In this paper we investigate the generalizability of the role of unequal opportunities and social group membership in redistributive preferences and examine the interaction between these two dimensions. We present results from a large-scale online experiment with more than 4,000 participants from Germany. The experiment consists of a real-effort task and a subsequent dictator game with native Germans and immigrants to Germany. We find that dictator transfers to the own group by native Germans and immigrants are higher under unequal opportunities than under equal opportunities. While we confirm the main findings reported in previous literature regarding the role of inequality of opportunity in redistribution for native Germans and immigrants, we find distinctively different patterns between both groups concerning the influence of social group membership and its interaction with unequal opportunities on redistribution. In particular, contrary to natives, immigrant dictators transfer more to in-group than to out-group receivers under unequal opportunities and do not compensate for unequal opportunities of out-group members. We conclude that in order to increase the understanding of patterns reported in the literature, it is crucial to also investigate the generalizability of findings to individuals from the general population and to explicitly cover participants such as immigrants who represent important parts of our society.
... The empirical evidence supports the idea that migration can change voting behaviour. Giuliano (68) show that the skill level of these migrants' matter, and that unskilled immigrants increased the vote share of the far-right party in Austria. Similarly, Dustmann et al. (69) found that increased immigration led to centre-right and far-right parties receiving more votes, but immigration into the largest urban areas generated greater support for left-wing and pro-immigrant parties. ...
There is a correlation between soccer's popularity and states that traditionally vote Democrat in US elections. This has led to claims that where democrats lead, soccer follows. Yet, this relationship may not be entirely stable, as soccer may stimulate the Democratic party vote through its multicultural elements. Using the 1994 World Cup as a plausibly exogenous shock that positioned US soccer, we investigate whether US states that hosted the tournament increased their Democratic vote in future Presidential elections. A two-way fixed-effects estimator and a dynamic difference-in-difference estimator shows that if a US state was a 1994 World Cup host, it increased its Democratic vote share. However, when examining Major League Soccer franchises, this relationship breaks down but recovers when investigating the women's World Cup in 1999 and 2003. As the swing states of Florida and Georgia are hosting 2026 World Cup matches, the findings may hold key insights for the 2028 Presidential election.
... The bulk of the relevant literature shows that the far-right appeals to and politically expresses citizens' anti-immigration and cultural concerns (Brunner & Kuhn, 2018;Edo et al., 2019;Halla et al., 2017;Harmon, 2018;Lonsky, 2021) . Indeed, as far as the question of national identity is concerned, a new cultural cleavage which opposes "open" positions of integration to "closed" positions of demarcation has an important impact on identity politics in European countries (Kriesi et al., 2008;Loch & Norocel, 2015). ...
Since the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent immigration crisis, public opposition to European integration has increased in southern European countries. This disaffection against European integration has coincided with public support for far-right ideologies and parties in Greece and Italy, two southern countries that were hit hard by both crises. However, it is still unclear whether public attitudes toward European integration are driven by economic hardship or cultural concerns. To explore this question, we draw on data from the Eurobarometer between 2012 and 2019. This study aims to provide further evidence about the cultural and utilitarian foundations of the European public opinion.
... For example,Funke, Schularick, and Trebesch (2016) analyse 20 developed countries from 1870 to 2014 and find that at the country level, financial crises increase far-right vote shares by 30 percent; in contrast, the authors do not find the same significant effect for far-left vote shares.Fourth, immigration accounts for a large part of the increase in right-wing populist vote. For example, in Austria,Halla, Wagner, and Zweimüller (2017), by using IV approach, conclude that between 1979 and 2013, when the immigrant percentage in a community increases by one percentage-point, the community FPÖ vote share goes up by about 0.16 percentage points. In the UK,Becker and Fetzer (2016) show that the Eastern European migrants' arrival to the UK post 2004 enlargement significantly increases UKIP vote share in the 2009 and 2014 EP elections. ...
This thesis seeks to empirically explain the rise of populism in advanced democracies. We focus our analysis on the demand of populism, materialised by populist vote, but also more generally by populist attitudes. The first chapter studies the link between income inequality and one aspect of populist attitudes, namely distrust of democracy. We find that greater income inequality corresponds to lower support for democracy and stronger support for alternative regimes (military, autocratic or technocratic). Furthermore, we highlight a partisan effect amplifying this relationship: at a given level of income inequality, as they are more sensitive to income inequality than right-wing partisans, left-wing partisans are also less supportive of democracy. The second chapter aims to test whether unemployment only explains populist vote in general or whether it also explains the distinction between right-wing and left-wing populist votes. By analysing the French presidential elections, we show that unemployment actually leads voters to choose any populist parties but that the choice between right-wing and left-wing populisms is exclusively determined by the voters' own explanation of unemployment. Finally, the third chapter examines the relationship between European funds and populist vote in EP elections since 2004. We provide major evidence of the negative link between EU funds and populist vote, regardless of the populist nature of the national/regional incumbent.
... Papers have examined the role of trade shocks (Autor et al. 2016;Colantone and Stanig 2018a;2018b;Becker et al. 2017;Alabrese et al. 2019;Dippel et al. 2017), macroeconomic shocks (Algan et al. 2017;Dal Bό et al. 2019), and the recent rise in automation (Im et al., 2019, Anelli et al., 2019. The second focuses on the impact of immigration with a number of papers finding an impact on populist voting (Edo et al. 2019;Halla et al. 2017;Barone et al. 2016;Levi et al. 2020;Dustmann et al. 2019). None of these papers study the joint role of economic and immigration shocks where both come from exogenous sources, which is the first major contribution of our paper. ...
We use electoral survey data to examine the impact that two large external shocks had on the development of New Zealand First (NZF), one of the oldest populist parties in the OECD. We find that structural reforms, which led to large negative impacts on particular locations, and immigration reforms, which led to large spatially concentrated increases in skilled migration, both increased voting for NZF in its first years of existence. These shocks led to changes in political attitudes and policy preferences and had persistent effects on voting for NZF even twenty years later. Overall, they play an important role in explaining the rise of populism in NZ. Understanding how these shocks led to the development of NZF is particularly relevant for thinking about how populism has been extending its reach in the 2010s.
... Data from the Italian Parliament. There are a number of papers (see for example, Halla et al., 2017;Hatton, 2017) that find that right-leaning individuals are more averse to immigration while individuals on the left are more favorable to it. (Separated) or associated with attachment to Italy (Integrated), positively affects the immigrants' employment probability, while we do not find a statistically significant effect for assimilated. ...
In this chapter, we explore the heterogeneity in the sources and channels whereby group identity influences the labor market performance of immigrants. Using survey data from Italy, we expand our previous findings (Carillo et al., 2023) by showing that group identities asymmmetrically affect immigrants' economic outcomes according to their socio-demographic characteristics, the political and socioeconomic environment of the host country, and their cultural distance from the native population. We find the largest positive effect of social identity for the less protected immigrants, i.e. those who face a more hostile environment or those with individual characteristics that are less adaptable to the new environment. Moreover, we provide evidence that the estimated effect of group membership seems to operate mainly through network externalities and peer effects. JEL: F22, J15, Z1 * We warmly thank Robert.M. Sauer. We also thank Roberto Nisticò, and Alberto Zazzaro for their comments and discussions. We are in debt with Klaus F. Zimmermann for numerous ideas and food for thought, born from the comparison in a companion paper. We are grateful to the Foundation for Initiatives and Studies on Multi-Ethnicity (ISMU) for kindly providing us with the data, and Alessio Menonna for assistance. Errors remain ours.
... understanding and thus a more sympathetic view of refugees and immigrants. On the other hand, Pettigrew (1998) stresses that intergroup interaction may, on the contrary, negatively affect prejudice (Bradburn et al., 1971;Barone et al., 2016;Halla et al., 2017). Other hypotheses in the social sciences emphasize negative responses to inflows of immigrants. ...
This article analyses the impact of non-informative communication on Europeans’ perceptions of European Union (EU) action on the issue of migration. We exploit the fact that Pope Francis’s visit to Lesbos Island in 16 April 2016, overlaps with the days of the interviews for a Special Eurobarometer survey, such that some respondents were unintentionally exposed to the Pope’s speech while others were not. Comparing Catholics and non-Catholics before and after the Pope’s visit in a difference-in-differences setting, we show that the papal message persuaded exposed Catholic individuals that EU action on the issue of migration is insufficient. The effect is temporary and varies according to the demographic characteristics of the respondents and by the country’s share of asylum applicants in 2015. Moreover, media exposure of the Pope’s visit, measured by the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone, was greater in Catholic countries, and this might explain the effect found.
... Threats to individual self-interest may not need to be real but need only be perceived [21]. It is such perceptions that might make it hard for the public to accept immigration [27]. Media in the host country may contribute to pro or anti-immigration attitudes. ...
One of the reasons why people hold anti-immigration attitudes is the fear that immigrants “rob jobs” of natives and decrease wages. However, academic literature finds that this is not the case. Nevertheless, in various countries, people still tend to oppose immigration. Opposition to immigration was particularly high in Turkey in the early 2000s, where almost half of the respondents to the Turkish part of the European Social Survey reported they would prefer to allow no immigrants into Turkey. This is although immigration to Turkey is very low. Turkey is becoming an important destination country as conflicts in neighboring countries force many people to flee. Therefore, understanding the opposition to immigration in Turkey is crucial managing age immigration flows efficiently. For this purpose, we investigate the determinants of attitudes towards immigration in Turkey using the European Social Survey and Turkish population census data. The findings of the ordered probit model reveal that Turkish people tend to hold more negative attitudes towards immigration where the regional share of immigrants is higher. The little chance of contact with immigrants in Turkey through a lower share of immigrants compared to other European countries seems to influence natives’ pro-immigrant attitudes negatively.
... According to the former, citizens view immigration from an egocentric perspective in light of a (perceived) competition for limited resources, such as access to the labor market or social benefits, between native-born citizens and immigrants (Zhirkov, 2014, p. 287). If voters perceive immigrants as threats to their job or to their outlook of an affordable flat, they may form immigration-skeptic attitudes (Halla et al., 2017). This idea features prominently in the modernization losers thesis, according to which rapid societal change (including immigration) overwhelms societal groups (e.g., those with lower income and educational resources) that may, in consequence, fear and reject immigration (Kitschelt & McGann, 1995). ...
Attitudes toward immigrants and immigration are a central explanation for the electoral support of far-right parties. However, while these parties gained strength over the last two decades, European citizens’ views about immigration have not changed much. In this study, we contribute to solving this puzzle by uncovering the flash potential of immigration. With its salience as a politically contested issue increasing, negative yet previously less relevant immigration preferences and evaluations transform more often into politically tangible attitudes and behaviors, such as support for far-right parties. We uncover this flash potential with individual-level ESS data and aggregated measures of issue salience among the public, allowing us to model the conditioning effects of contextual-level immigration salience on the individual-level relationship between immigration attitudes and far-right support. The results from random-effects within-between models analyzing 208,794 individual respondents from 141 country-rounds and 24 countries over the period of 2002–2018 show that the effects of citizens’ attitudes on support for far-right parties are stronger in contexts and periods in which the salience of immigration is higher. Accordingly, while immigration attitudes among European public have not turned more negative over time, they have become more influential for citizens’ party attachments and vote choices.
... The studies on the refugee inflows after 2014 are part of a broader literature that studies the effects of immigration on voting behavior over longer periods. Immigration increased support for far-right parties (Otto and Steinhardt 2014), especially when migrants were low-educated and from non-Western countries (Edo et al. 2019) or in regions that were economically struggling and where amenities were suffering (Halla et al. 2017, Tomberg et al. 2021. The papers relate the negative sentiments to concerns about the labor market or welfare system and to negative externalities of refugees on compositional amenities. ...
... Nowadays, it is a fact that Rightist parties are winning seats in many parliaments of developed countries thanks to the support of poor, low-educated voters (see [2], for the changes in voting patterns over the last 75 years). To attract this type of vote, these parties campaign against immigration and in favor of greater expenditure on border enforcement and homeland security, painting immigrants as job stealers and criminals [3,4]. Other policies that aim to defend nationalistic sentiments and traditional values place blame on various collectives, such as separatist movements, LGBT or feminist groups, are also commonly used for the same goal [5,6]. ...
This paper studies the effect of income inequality and voters’ support for public spending on the choice of size of the welfare state. Based on new empirical findings showing that preferences for taxation depend on the nature of the policies financed with tax revenues (Barnes 2015, Ballard-Rosa 2016, Roosma 2016, and Berens 2019) I build a Downsian two-party political competition framework in which voters differ in both income (rich or poor) and ideology (liberal or conservative). Government provides two types of public services: one that increase the size of the welfare state and other that does not. Liberal (conservative) voters only care about the public service that increase (do not increase) the size of the welfare state. I find that the decisive voter and the size of the welfare state depends on both the level of income inequality and voters’ support for public spending. In particular, and different from the traditional models on redistributive politics (Romer 1975, Roberts 1977, and Meltzer 1981), I obtain that an increase in pre tax income inequality may reduce the size of the welfare state chosen by majority voting.
... Immigration and integration issues have become increasingly important in West European politics, partly as a consequence of the rise of anti-immigration parties (Heerden et al. 2014). Immigration has a sizable causal increase in votes for the centre-right coalition (Abou-Chadi and Helbling 2018; Halla et al. 2017; Barone et al. 2016;Otto and Steinhardt 2014;Della Posta 2013;Lubbers et al. 2002), and anti-integration positions in the EU (Goodwin and Milazzo 2017;Dennison and Goodwin 2015;Vreese and Boomgaarden 2005). Indeed, immigration is a catalyst for most right-wing parties (Mudde 1999). ...
We cannot ignore that anti-immigration parties are becoming essential players in present democracies. But, how concerned should we be with the effects of immigration on the host economy? According to estimates, integration is the main asset of the Spanish immigration policy: in the long term, immigrants are legally indistinguishable; hence, they produce a similar effect on employment and growth. However, employment policies could enhance the long-term contribution of immigration to economic growth and, indirectly, boost employment creation. The effectiveness of immigration policies is thus attached to employment policies. In the short term, registered unemployment seems to be further protected against economic shocks. The frequency-wise analysis makes for a deeper understanding of the role of immigration in the Spanish economy.
... We consider foreign population and refugees (i.a. Barone et al., 2016;Halla et al., 2017), educated people (Denti & Faggian, 2021;Lancee & Sarrasin, 2015;Piff & Robinson, 2017), crime rate (i.a. Dustmann & Fasani, 2016), unemployment (i.a. ...
How local cultural activities influence development and human behaviour is gaining popularity. Experimental evidence shows that cultural consumption is effective in countering hate. This is crucial, as hate, in turn, has a negative influence on the socioeconomic performance of places. Still, little is known on this, outside few more qualitative case studies. This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the impact of cultural consumption on hate events in the Italian NUTS3 regions. IV estimation using a unique longitudinal database, with georeferenced hate manifestations and a population-based measure for cultural consumption, shows that cultural consumption determines a reduction in hate events. Our findings support the idea that cultural change acts as key enabling factor for people open-mindedness and place inclusiveness. Our results hold after various robustness checks, suggesting the need for policy interventions promoting cultural consumption also to accomplish more tolerant communities.
... Several studies look at the effect that (refugee) migration has on voting outcomes (see e.g. Halla, Wagner, and Zweimüller 2017;Barone et al. 2016;Dustmann, Vasiljeva, and Piil Damm 2018;Medez and Cutillas 2014;Otto and Steinhardt 2014;Edo et al. 2019).⁶ They find that a higher share of refugees is associated with an increase in the vote share for center-right and far-right parties but fail to explain the source of the xenophobic attitudes that drive these results. ...
This thesis uncovers and studies determinants of economic decision making and political attitudes that have so far received little attention in economics. It focuses on three factors - social image concerns, moral values and sexual competition - all of which are shown to be relevant for the functioning of communities. The first chapter studies whether public shaming played a role in men’s decision to join the British Army during World War I by exploiting a natural experiment. At the beginning of the war, young girls would hand out white feathers to men not in uniform in an attempt to shame them as cowards. The chapter shows that this shaming strategy had an effect on recruitment numbers suggesting that social image concerns can induce costly altruistic behavior that benefits the group. Whereas the first chapter studies a factor inducing cooperation in societies, the second and the third chapter look at two different factors which can explain social and political disagreement. The second chapter explores how moral values shape beliefs about facts based on results from an online experiment. It shows how the salience of the moral dimension of a political debate increases polarization in beliefs between people on the left and the right of the political spectrum. The third chapter looks at the consequences a skewed sex ratio can have on the political preferences and xenophobic attitudes of young men. We hypothesize that in environments where male-male competition for female partners is high, the frustration from being single and concerns about status and male identity are more severe and can foster out-group hatred. Using observational data for Germany, this chapter provides evidence that in areas which have a significant surplus of men people are more likely to hold xenophobic attitudes and vote for right-wing extremist parties.
... This sense of vulnerability fosters resentment towards immigrants perceived as an economic and cultural threat, increasing the likelihood of voting for right-wing populist parties. For example, Halla et al. (2017) studied the effect of immigration on votes for the Freedom Party of Austria (a right-wing populist party). They found a significant relationship between immigrant inflow and the voting share for the party. ...
Based on 2020 Twitter data, this article studies the social construction of populist identity in Italy. Starting from Tajfel's social identity theory (1978), the research aims at dissecting the elements at the basis of the populist identity construction process. The analysis focuses on both quantitative analysis and qualitative inspection of the tweets of four populist leaders, namely Salvini (LN), Meloni (FDI), Berlusconi (FI), and Di Maio (M5S). Results highlight the outgroup's position and its functional role in strengthening relative deprivation to facilitate ingroup identification. In addition, the populist social identity is built on group membership and the biased comparison between the ingroup and one or more outgroups. Results demonstrate how leaders’ strategies change based on being in government or not and according to their position on the left-right axis. In this context, the pandemic offered a further political opportunity, especially to those who have found themselves in government.
... A key determinant for immigration to foster economic prosperity over the medium and long run are attitudes of the host country's population. Western economies have, however, recently been subject to increasing economic protectionism, public opposition towards immigration and stronger support for right-wing anti-immigration policy agendas (Barone et al. 2016;Colantone and Stanig 2019;Halla et al. 2017). ...
We investigate the link between biased beliefs about immigrants, economic concerns and policy preferences. Conducting representative survey experiments with more than 8000 respondents, we first document substantial biases in respondents’ beliefs about the immigrant population in various domains. Exposure to different types of signals about immigrants reduces concerns about adverse effects of immigration on the welfare state. On the contrary, different types of signals offset their effects on concerns about increasing labor market competition. Employing a data-driven approach to uncover systematic effect heterogeneity, we find that prior beliefs about immigration explain conditional average treatment effects. While attitudinal change is thus more pronounced among individuals with pre-intervention biases about immigrants, education and attitudes towards cultural diversity are additional drivers of heterogeneity. Treatment effects on welfare state concerns persist in a five to eight week follow-up.
... A key determinant for immigration to foster economic prosperity over the medium and long run are attitudes of the host country's population. Western economies have, however, recently been subject to increasing economic protectionism, public opposition towards immigration and stronger support for right-wing anti-immigration policy agendas (Barone et al. 2016;Colantone and Stanig 2019;Halla et al. 2017). ...
We investigate the link between biased beliefs about immigrants, economic concerns and policy preferences. Conducting representative survey experiments with more than 8000 respondents, we first document substantial biases in respondents' beliefs about the immigrant population in various domains. Exposure to different types of signals about immigrants reduces concerns about adverse effects of immigration on the welfare state. On the contrary, different types of signals offset their effects on concerns about increasing labor market competition. Employing a data-driven approach to uncover systematic effect heterogeneity, we find that prior beliefs about immigration explain conditional average treatment effects. While attitudinal change is thus more pronounced among individuals with pre-intervention biases about immigrants, education and attitudes towards cultural diversity are additional drivers of heterogeneity. Treatment effects on welfare state concerns persist in a five to eight week follow-up.
JEL-Codes: C900, D830, F220, H200, J150.
... A number of recent contributions have considered the link between economic insecurity and, variously, support for populist parties (Guiso et al., 2020;Guriev and Papaioannou, 2022, among others), a lack of trust toward the EU (Algan et al., 2017;Dustmann et al., 2017;Foster and Frieden, 2017), the 2016 US Presidential election (Inglehart and Norris, 2016;Mutz, 2018, among many others), and the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership (e.g., Sampson, 2017;Colantone and Stanig, 2018). Economic insecurity is proposed in these contributions as an alternative explanation of populist preferences to a cultural backlash against progressive values, such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism (as in Inglehart and Norris, 2016;Halla et al., 2017;Dustmann et al., 2019) or status threat, following Mutz (2018). ...
Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention, but there is no consensus as to its definition. We characterize a class of individual economic-insecurity measures based on the time profile of economic resources. We apply this economic-insecurity measure to political-preference data in the USA, UK, and Germany. Conditional on current economic resources, economic insecurity is associated with both greater political participation (support for a party or the intention to vote) and more support for conservative parties. In particular, economic insecurity predicts greater support for both Donald Trump before the 2016 US Presidential election and the UK leaving the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
... The authors circumscribe their estimation to 95 Greek islands and found that in those more exposed to the wave of refugees, there was an increase of support for far-right parties. Halla et al. (2017) investigate the effect of immigration on Austria and the rise of the far-right party Freedom Party of Austria. There is a positive and significant impact at the neighbourhood level. ...
We study the effect of immigration on the upsurge of right-wing populism in Italy. Our data considers electoral results at the municipality level of the Senate of the Italian Republic and the Chamber of Deputies over the period 2006–2018. Using an IV strategy based on the shift–share instrument, we find that immigration generates a sizable causal increase in votes for the right-wing populist party Lega. Immigration also works as a major catalyst for the electoral distance between Lega and its most direct competitors. We explore how different levels of tax autonomy impact the results, as well as how the re-branding of Lega as a national movement affects the relation between immigration and support for the party.
... Today, countries facing unsolicited mass immigration particularly in Europe and North America (see [50]) are far from any active promotion of migration. Their governments are under pressure from large fractions of their voters who disapprove of massive immigration, particularly of migrants with strongly differing cultural backgrounds [51,52]. Governments therefore discourage or even try to deter an unauthorized entry of migrants. ...
The fact that innovative capitalism needs institutional co-evolution has widely been recognized with respect to pro-active institutional adaptations. Examples are the rearrangement and safeguarding of supply chains or the creation of public institutions providing indispensable systemic infrastructure. These adaptations facilitate the innovative expansion of capitalism. Less attention has been paid to the fact that institutional co-evolution is also necessary where the repercussions of major innovative breakthroughs trigger social tensions and environmental damages or ecological hazards. The present paper is therefore devoted to an investigation of the latter kind of institutional co-evolution. These adaptations are usually reactive ones because critical side effects of innovations often only turn out with a delay. The causal nexus between the dynamics of innovative capitalism and the emergence of critical situations that require re-active institutional adaptations will be discussed by means of two examples. One is the crisis of the global commons, most notable the global climate change. The other example is the recent mass migration crisis. Finally, the policy options regarding necessary institutional adaptations will briefly be outlined for the two examples.
... They suggest a much bigger effect of economically motivated migrants on the rise of far-right votes than I will document for the refugee inflow case in Turkey. For Austria, Halla et al. (2017) show that a one standard deviation increase in the share of immigrants leads to a one-quarter of a standard deviation increase in the far-right party votes, and the immigration of low-and medium-skilled workers drive the impact. In Otto and Steinhardt (2014), the effect size explains roughly a quarter of the increase in the anti-immigration party vote in the districts of Hamburg. ...
This paper investigates the effects of refugee inflow on the voting behavior of natives. I employ a difference in differences strategy to identify the voter reaction against the sudden inflow of Syrian refugees to Turkey and use unique data provided by Turk Telecom to proxy natives’ refugee exposure. Data coming from mobile phone usage track the mobility of refugees throughout the year and enables the construction of refugee exposure measures across small geographical areas. I show a small drop in the government party vote share that announced an ‘open door’ policy for refugees. Furthermore, there is evidence for the reaction heterogeneity based on the socio-economic development levels of refugee-hosting areas. While there is a null response in ethnically Kurdish and economically lagging East, a negative reaction is concentrated in socioeconomically more developed areas. Then, exploring the effects in rural and urban areas reveals an interesting divide in the refugee exposure patterns of hosting areas. While in rural areas, natives react against the refugee presence, in urban areas, they react when the mobility (visibility) increases. Anecdotal evidence might help to put findings in context. Manipulating the concerns of voters on Syrians’ receiving citizenship and demographic change might be regarded as two main strategies used by opposition parties. These strategies help convince the secular and conservative-nationalist voters in socioeconomically developed areas. (JEL codes: J01, J08, and J15)
... In support for the context hypothesis, Barone et al. (2016) find that immigration generates a causal increase in votes for the centre-right coalition with anti-immigrant sentiment in Italy, while Halla et al. (2017) provide evidence that immigration increases demand for far right-wing parties in Austria. They both argue that cultural diversity, competition in the labour market and for public services and concerns for the quality of their neighbourhood are the most relevant channels at work. ...
This article assesses progress in the economics-centred literature on populism along three key themes and develops a conceptual framework to better understand the phenomenon. On the demand side (t − 1), economics research identifies the effect of an exogenous economic shock on a marginalised segment of society and works with the economic voting hypothesis. On the supply side of populists in power (t), in the literature, populist rule is typically associated with unsustainable expansionary fiscal and monetary policies and with trade protectionism. At t + 1, by using rational and biased belief assumptions, economists provide implicit inputs for a seemingly paradoxical question: why is a populist re-elected even if most populist policies assumably end up in Pareto inferior outcomes? This article summarises and criticises the relevant economic literature and shows that not only political science, but economics scholarship is instrumental for studying populism at all three stages.
... In general, group-threat theory also often receives support in studies analyzing aggregate vote outcomes, which tend to find that diversity boosts aggregate vote shares for right-wing and anti-immigration parties (Barone et al., 2016;Dustmann et al., 2016;Edo et al., 2019;Halla et al., 2017;Harmon, 2017;Otto & Steinhardt, 2014), although some research reaches different conclusions (Mendez & Cutillas, 2014;Steinmayer, 2016). At the same time, studies analyzing aggregate turnout find mixed effects (Barone et al., 2016;Bratti et al., 2017;Dustmann et al., 2016;Edo et al., 2019;Mendez & Cutillas, 2014). ...
We study the impact of refugee inflows on voter turnout in Sweden in a period when shifting immigration patterns made the previously homogeneous country increasingly heterogeneous. Analyzing individual‐level panel data and exploiting a national refugee placement program to obtain plausibly exogenous variation in immigration, we find that refugee inflows significantly raise the probability of voter turnout. Balancing tests on initial turnout as well as placebo tests regressing changes in turnout on future refugee inflows support the causal interpretation of our findings. The results are consistent with group‐threat theory, which predicts that increased out‐group presence spurs political mobilization among in‐group members.
This study investigates populist radical right (PRR) influence on aid amid widespread concerns about a potential connection between its rise and the reduction of aid allocation. Previous studies failed to address these concerns owing to the disuse of immigrant inflows as an intervening variable and a bilateral framework capable of investigating properties in donor and recipient countries. By analyzing panel data on Western European parliamentary democracies, the study demonstrates the PRR’s reducing effect via a coalitional pathway on bilateral aid to the recipients, failing to stem emigration into the donor countries. Further, analysis shows that such reduction intensifies in conjunction with the donors’ weak pluralistic institutions and the recipients’ sociocultural characteristics different from the ordinary citizens represented by the PRR. The findings make a novel contribution to the expanding literature on the PRR to integrate insights on the aid–immigration nexus, strategies for policy influence, and ideational profiles.
Although addressing income inequalities is one of the main challenges in the European Union (EU), whether the EU has influenced income distributions, possibly causing a rise in inequalities, is still a heavily underexplored topic. Using the newest methodological developments associated with the counterfactual estimations, I assessed the distributional effects of the 2004 EU enlargement. The results indicate that EU accession cannot be held responsible for any significant changes in income inequalities in the New Member States. That finding is robust to changes in the method of estimation, and it is also supported by dynamic panel data methods.
We review and interpret research on the economic and political effects of receiving asylum seekers and refugees in developed countries, with a particular focus on the 2015 European refugee protection crisis and its aftermath. In the first part of the paper, we examine the consequences of receiving asylum seekers and refugees and identify two main findings. First, the reception of refugees is unlikely to generate large direct economic effects. Both labor market and fiscal consequences for host countries are likely to be relatively modest. Second, however, the broader political processes accompanying the reception and integration of refugees may give rise to indirect yet larger economic effects. Specifically, a growing body of work suggests that the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees can fuel the rise of anti-immigrant populist parties, which may lead to the adoption of economically and politically isolationist policies. Yet, these political effects are not inevitable and occur only under certain conditions. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the conditions under which these effects are less likely to occur. We argue that refugees’ effective integration along relevant linguistic, economic, and legal dimensions, an allocation of asylum seekers that is perceived as ‘fair’ by the host society, and meaningful contact between locals and newly arrived refugees have the potential to mitigate the political and indirect economic risks.
We analyze the role of changes in the geographic concentration of immigrants in shaping teachers’ assessment of students’ performance. By using data on Italian students attending the 5th grade, we adopt an IV estimation strategy and, by controlling for student performance in blindly-scored tests of proficiency, find that an increasing presence of immigrants in the local population negatively affects the way teachers evaluate immigrant students, as opposed to their peers, in non-blindly-graded tests. We also reveal that the effect is mainly driven by schools located in smaller communities and in areas with lower overall levels of educational attainment and that it is unlikely to be related to the conduct of immigrant students who live in the areas experiencing sizable increases in immigration flows. In addition, older teachers tend to be more biased.
We investigate how demand for both the financing and the provision of redistributive policies is affected by information about immigration and poverty. Information about immigration has a positive impact on desired tax progressivity among low-income respondents and a negative one among higher income earners. Information about poverty has no impact. On the provision side, middle- and high-income respondents increase desired public education expenditure in response to poverty, while low-income respondents reduce desired education spending in response to immigration. These heterogeneities are consistent with protectionist reactions to immigration and poverty.
Während Populismus in Europa weiterhin weitverbreitet ist, sieht sich der Kontinent mit einer neuen Flüchtlingsdynamik konfrontiert. Nach der Krise von 2015/2016 ist die EU nun damit beschäftigt, die Herausforderungen der ukrainischen Zuwanderung besser und effizienter zu bewältigen. Aufgrund geopolitischer Veränderungen und zunehmender globaler Ungleichheit ist auch in Zukunft mit weiterer Zuwanderung zu rechnen. Da häufig die These vertreten wird, dass die Zuwanderung Populismus und die Unterstützung für rechtsextreme Parteien verstärkt, kann dies zu politischer Instabilität und Spaltung führen. In diesem Beitrag wird der Zusammenhang zwischen regionalen Disparitäten in der Flüchtlingskrise 2015/2016 und dem Erfolg der AfD bei der Bundestagswahl 2017 untersucht.
While populism remains rife in Europe, the continent is facing a new refugee dynamic. In the aftermath of the 2015-16 crisis, the EU is grappling with how to better address the challenges posed by Ukrainian immigration. Geopolitical changes and rising global
inequality will further increase immigration in the future. It is often argued that immigration promotes populism and support for far-right parties, which can lead to political instability and disunity. This paper examines the relationship between regional differences in the 2015-16 refugee crisis and the success of the AfD in the 2017 federal election.
This chapter describes an oral history project conducted between 2013 and 2015 on the case of Sesto San Giovanni, on the northern edge of Milan. All four major firms that had made Sesto’s manufacturing history during the twentieth century closed their plants down over the 1980s and the 1990s. The chapter summarizes the goals, starting assumptions, methodology of that project, also considering the political developments at local level since 2015 and suggesting their relevance to the subject matter of this book and to how scholarship is dealing with the long-term aftermaths of deindustrialization. It frames the research project in the Italian oral history tradition as discipline and practice, in dialogue with public history and with cultural studies.
Will the fast expansion of cash-based programming in poor countries increase international migration? Theoretically, cash transfers may deter migration by increasing its opportunity cost or favor migration by relaxing liquidity, credit, and risk constraints. This paper evaluates the impact of a cash-for-work program on migration. Randomly selected households in Comoros were offered up to US$320 in cash in exchange for their participation in public works projects. We find that the program increased international migration by 38% from 7.8% to 10.8%. The increase in migration appears to be driven by the alleviation of liquidity and risk constraints.
How does previous exposure to massive immigrant inflows affect concerns about current immigration and the integration of refugees? To answer this question, we investigate attitudes toward newcomers among natives and previous immigrants. In areas that in the 1990s received higher inflows of immigrants of German origin—the so-called ethnic Germans—native Germans are more likely to believe that refugees are a resource for the economy and the culture, viewing them as an opportunity rather than a risk. Refugees living in these areas report better health and feel less exposed to xenophobia.
How did the large asylum-seeker inflow to Germany in 2015 affect concerns about immigration? Using individual-level panel data for the years 2012–2018 and a policy that allocates asylum-seekers to districts, I identify the effect of exposure to asylum-seekers. In line with the contact hypothesis, living in a high refugee migration district reduced concerns about immigration by 3 pp. Alternatively, a 1 pp. increase in the share of asylum-seekers in the population reduced these concerns by 3.4 pp. The effect appears larger for right-leaning respondents and is driven by districts that do not host a large reception centre. However, the overall trend indicates that after 2015 concerns about immigration increased by about 21 pp. and support for extreme right-wing parties by about 1.7 pp. These trends show considerable heterogeneity for different demographic groups.
Given that voting is the bedrock of any functional democracy, it is an intriguing puzzle as to why many eligible voters often choose not to vote. The rational choice theory posits that voters might decide to stay away from voting, especially if they believe that their votes are inconsequential and not enough to change the outcomes of an election, especially involving many unrelated voters. However, other socioeconomic factors may modify that belief as voters may respond to the environment they live in and vote accordingly just to make a statement. Also, affinity to other fellow citizens and the presence of social capital may lead the voters to vote in higher numbers to signal voter solidarity. Using the US Census Bureau’s voting participation and citizenship composition data at the state levels for the year 2020, this paper shows that citizens feel positively inclined to participate in voting if a larger percentage of citizens are registered to vote. Furthermore, controlling for voter registration and regional indicator variables, non-voting (by the registered voters) seems to decline (voting seems to increase) as the percentage of non-citizens increases in the population. The first result seems to point to the non-trivial role played by social capital and voter affinity in increasing turnout, while the second and the key result of this paper seems to indicate that larger immigration numbers may energize the citizens to vote in higher numbers, thereby reducing the percentage of citizens who do not vote. Further evidence regarding regional variations suggests that controlling for voter registration and percentage of non-citizens in the population, non-voting may be lower in the North-Eastern and Western regions of the USA compared to the Southern and Mid-Western regions. Asymmetries in regional immigrations, voter registration and voter engagement present a very interesting dynamism for future elections and public policy formulation in the USA.
Als der Zuzug von Geflüchteten nach Deutschland Ende 2015 gerade seinen Höhepunkt erreichte, schnellten die Umfragewerte der AfD in die Höhe. Der damalige stellvertretende AfD-Vorsitzende Alexander Gauland sprach in diesem Zusammenhang von der „Flüchtlingskrise“ als einem „Geschenk“ für seine Partei. So provokant seine Aussage auch erscheinen mag: Nur wenige Sozialwissenschaftler bezweifeln, dass sich Migration positiv auf das Wahlergebnis der AfD ausgewirkt hat. Doch worauf kommt es bei diesem Zusammenhang an? Führt ein größerer Anteil an MigrantInnen zwangsläufig zu einem höheren Stimmanteilen der AfD? Oder erklären sich die Wahlerfolge der AfD eher aus der gestiegenen Salienz des Themas Migration? Diesen Annahmen wird in diesem Beitrag nachgegangen. Dabei werden zwei unterschiedliche Wege beschritten: Zum einen wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob die AfD eher vom statischen Ausländeranteil oder von einem Anstieg in diesen Anteilen profitiert. Dies würde einen direkten Zusammenhang zwischen Migration und den Wahlergebnissen der AfD nahelegen. Zum anderen wird
geprüft, ob die Salienz des Themas Migration eine zentrale Voraussetzung für die Mobilisierung rechtspopulistischer Wählerschaft und damit einen wichtigen Erfolgsfaktor für die AfD darstellt. Die Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass das Zusammenspiel aus schnell gewachsenem Ausländeranteil und damit einhergehender
gestiegener Salienz des Themas Migration zu einem Erstarken der
AfD führten.
Building upon the literature on attitudes to immigration, which mainly focuses on Europe and North America, this article explores the role of inter-group interaction in influencing host community attitudes towards refugees in East Africa. It draws upon first-hand quantitative (n = 16,608) and qualitative data collected from refugees and nearby host communities in urban and camp-like contexts in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Focusing on the Uganda data, for which host community attitude and interaction data is available, OLS regressions reveal a small positive and significant correlation between refugee-host interaction and the perception of hosts towards refugees. This association disappears when an instrumental variable (IV) approach is used to address endogeneity issues, except when only data from the urban context is used. Combining cross-country data and qualitative data, we highlight some conditions that may shape hosts’ attitudes towards refugees, including the types of interaction, ethno-linguistic proximity, and residence in urban or camp-like contexts. In all contexts, an important part of attitude formation appears to take place at the intra-group level, within households and immediate neighbourhoods, independently of individual interaction with the out-group.
This paper studies the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote share for the Republican Party using county-level data from 1990 to 2016. Our main contribution is to show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases the share of Republican votes, while an inflow of low-skilled immigrants increases it. These effects are mainly due to the indirect impact on existing citizens’ votes, and this is independent of the origin country and race of immigrants. We find that the political effect of immigration is heterogeneous across counties and depends on their skill level, public spending, and noneconomic characteristics. (JEL D72, J15, J24, J61, R23)
We synthesize the literature on the recent rise of populism. First, we discuss definitions and present descriptive evidence on the recent increase in support for populists. Second, we cover the historical evolution of populist regimes since the late nineteenth century. Third, we discuss the role of secular economic factors related to cross-border trade and automation. Fourth, we review studies on the role of the 2008–09 global financial crisis and subsequent austerity, connect them to historical work covering the Great Depression, and discuss likely mechanisms. Fifth, we discuss studies on identity politics, trust, and cultural backlash. Sixth, we discuss economic and cultural consequences of growth in immigration and the recent refugee crisis. We also discuss the gap between perceptions and reality regarding immigration. Seventh, we review studies on the impact of the internet and social media. Eighth, we discuss the literature on the implications of populism’s recent rise. We conclude outlining avenues for further research. (JEL D72, E32, G01, J15, N30, N40, Z13)
We investigate the influence of anti-immigrant parties on foreigners' location choices. Considering Italian municipal elections from 2000 to 2018, we create a comprehensive database that includes a classification of the anti-/pro-immigration axis of leading political parties based on specialists' assessments. Adopting a bias-corrected regression discontinuity design, we find that the election of a mayor supported by an anti-immigrant coalition significantly affects immigrants' location choices only when considering the most recent years. This finding is not driven by the enactment of policies against immigrants but by an ‘inhospitality effect’, which has become stronger over time due to the exacerbation of political propaganda. Therefore, foreigners' flows are influenced by the local political environment only when immigration is central to the political debate.
We examine the impact of the Great Depression on the share of votes for right-wing extremists in elections in the 1920s and 1930s. We confirm the existence of a link between political extremism and economic hard times as captured by growth or contraction of the economy. What mattered was not simply growth at the time of the election, but cumulative growth performance. The impact was greatest in countries with relatively short histories of democracy, with electoral systems that created low hurdles to parliamentary representation, and which had been on the losing side in World War I.
This article presents an overview of the writings on the extreme right party family of the third wave (1980–95). First, the prime criterion for the classification of the party family is discussed. Second, the main critiques of, and alternatives to, the term right‐wing extremism are evaluated. Third, the political parties that are generally considered to be members of the party family are identified. Fourth, subgroups within the larger party family are examined. In the conclusion, the various writings are structured on the basis of four theoretical schools within the broader study of right‐wing extremism.
The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of historical variables on contemporary income by explicitly taking into account the ancestral composition of current populations. The evidence suggests that economic development is affected by traits that have been transmitted across generations over the very long run. This article surveys this new literature and provides a framework to discuss different channels through which intergenerationally transmitted characteristics may impact economic development, biologically (via genetic or epigenetic transmission) and culturally (via behavioral or symbolic transmission). An important issue is whether historically transmitted traits have affected development through their direct impact on productivity, or have operated indirectly as barriers to the diffusion of productivity-enhancing innovations across populations.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
This paper tests hypotheses concerning the effects of economic factors on public opinion toward immigration policy. Using the 1992 and 1994 National Election Study surveys, probit models are employed to test diverse conceptualizations of the effects of economic adversity and anxiety on opposition to immigration. The results indicate that personal economic circumstances play little role in opinion formation, but beliefs about the state of the national economy, anxiety over taxes, and generalized feelings about Hispanics and Asians, the major immigrant groups, are significant determinants of restrictionist sentiment. This restricted role of economic motives rooted in one's personal circumstances held true across ethnic groups, among residents in communities with different numbers of foreign-born, and in both 1992 and 1994.
In their article about individual and contextual characteristics of the German extreme right-wing vote in the 1990s, Lubbers and Scheepers (‘Individual and contextual characteristics of the German extreme right-wing vote in the 1990s: A test of complementary theories’, European Journal of Political Research 38 (2000): 63–94) found a contra- intuitive significant negative relationship between unemployment rate and an individual's likelihood of voting for the right-wing extremist Republikaner Party. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the reasons for this puzzling result. To capture contextual information resembling the individual's life sphere as close as possible, we use data that allow us to include the districts as an additional level between the individual and the state in our multilevel analyses.
This article uses 1990 census data to study the effects of immigrant inflows on occupation-specific labor market outcomes. I find that intercity mobility rates of natives and earlier immigrants are insensitive to immigrant inflows. However, occupation-specific wages and employment rates are systematically lower in cities with higher relative supplies of workers in a given occupation. The results imply that immigrant inflows over the 1980s reduced wages and employment rates of low-skilled natives in traditional gateway cities like Miami and Los Angeles by 1-3 percentage points. Copyright 2001 by University of Chicago Press.
This paper uses three years of individual-level data to analyze the determinants of individual preferences over immigration policy in the United States. We have two main empirical results. First, less-skilled workers are significantly more likely to prefer limiting immigrant inflows into the United States. Our finding suggests that, over the time horizons that are relevant to individuals when evaluating immigration policy, individuals think that the U.S. economy absorbs immigrant inflows at least partly by changing wages. Second, we find no evidence that the relationship between skills and immigration opinions is stronger in high-immigration communities. © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog
This paper studies the effect of increased immigration in Austria on the unemployment risk of young natives. Austria experienced a dramatic rise in the share of alien workers as a result of the breakdown of the former communist regimes (especially from former Yugoslavia). We concentrate on unemployment entry of young male workers, who are supposed to compete most heavily with new immigrants. Our results indicate that the detrimental impact - if it exists at all - is only minor. This is irrespective of the analyzed proxy for competition: The share of foreign workers in an industry or in a region.
This paper examines the effects of immigration on the labor market outcomes of less-skilled natives. Working from a simple model of a local labor market, we show that the effects of immigration can be estimated from the correlations between the fraction of immigrants in a city and the employment and wage outcomes of natives. The size of the effects depend on the fraction and skill composition of the immigrants. We go on to compute these correlations using city-specific outcomes for individuals in 120 major SMSA's in the 1970 and 1980 Censuses. We also use the relative industry distributions of immigrants and natives to provide a direct assessment of the degree of labor market competition between them. Our empirical findings indicate a modest degree of competition between immigrants and less-skilled natives. A comparison of industry distributions shows that an increase in the fraction of immigrants in the labor force translates to an approximately equivalent percentage increase in the supply of labor to industries in which less-skilled natives are employed. Based on this calculation, immigrant influws between 1970 and 1980 generated 1-2 percent increases in labor supply to these industries in most cities. A comparison of industry distributions of less-skilled natives in high- and low-immigrant share cities between 1970 and 1980 shows some displacement out of low-wage immigrant-intensive industries. We find little effect of immigration on the employment outcomes of the four race/sex groups that we consider. Our estimates of the effect of immigration on the wages of less-skilled natives are sensitive to the specification and estimation procedure. However, our preferred estimates, which are based on first differences between 1980 and 1970 and the use of instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of immigrant inflows, imply that an increase in immigrants equal to 1 percent of an SMSA's population reduces native wages by roughly 1.2 percent.
VP-functions explain the support for the government at votes and polls by economic and political variables. Most studies analyze macro time series. The authors also cover studies of individual voters, socioeconomic groups, and regional cross-sections. The theory starts from the responsibility hypothesis: voters hold the government responsible for economic conditions. It works in two party/block systems, but not else. Voters in most countries are found to be sociotropic. Egotropic voting also occurs. Voters' myopia is well established. Voting is retrospective as expectations are static. It costs the average government almost 2 percent of the vote to rule. Copyright 1994 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
In this paper we study the effects on support for different political parties due to an increase in the immigrant share in Danish municipalities during the period 1989-2001. We find that the immigrant share has some notable effects. The anti-immigration parties are among those that win votes when the immigrant share increases, but a pro-immigration party on the left also gains from an increase in the immigrant share. The non-socialist party that is most pro-immigration, however, loses votes when the immigrant share increases. Our results indicate that in the elections some Danish voters voice their displeasure about immigration in their own neighbourhood. But we find no clear indication of a general decline in support for the welfare state on account of immigration, as several scholars have been predicting.
This paper analyzes welfare-state determinants of individual attitudes towards immigrants - within and across countries - and their interaction with labor-market drivers of preferences. We consider two different mechanisms through which a redistributive welfare system might adjust as a result of immigration. Under the first scenario, immigration has a larger impact on individuals at the top of the income distribution, while under the second one it is low-income individuals who are most affected through this channel. Individual attitudes are consistent with the first welfare-state scenario and with labor-market determinants of immigration attitudes. In countries where natives are on average more skilled than immigrants, individual income is negatively correlated with pro-immigration preferences, while individual skill is positively correlated with them. These relationships have the opposite signs in economies characterized by skilled migration (relative to the native population). Such results are confirmed when we exploit international di®erences in the characteristics of destination countries' wel-fare state. Classification-JEL Codes: F22, F1, J61
We combine community-level outcomes of 27 votes about immigration issues in Switzerland with census data to estimate the effect of immigration on natives' attitudes towards immigrants. We apply an instrumental variable approach to take potentially endogenous locational choices into account, and we categorize immigrants into two groups according to the cultural values and beliefs of their country of origin to understand how the cultural distance between natives and immigrants affects this relationship. We find that the share of culturally different immigrants is a significant and sizable determinant of anti-immigration votes, while the presence of culturally similar immigrants does not affect natives' voting behavior at all in most specifications. We argue that the differential impact of the two groups of immigrants is, at least in part, driven by natives' concerns about compositional amenities. We finally find that the share of right-wing votes in favor of the Swiss People's Party appears to be more elastic with respect to the share of culturally different immigrants than natives' attitudes themselves, suggesting that the party has gained a disproportionate vote share from attitudinal changes caused by immigrant inflows.
Using Italian municipality-level data on national elections and IV estimation strategy, we find that immigration generates a sizable causal increase in votes for the centre-right coalition, which has a political platform less favorable to immigrants. Additional findings are: (i) the effect is heterogeneous across municipalities with different sizes; (ii) the gain in votes for the centre-right coalition corresponds to a loss of votes for the centre and centre-left parties, a decrease in voter turnout, and a rise in protest votes; (iii) the relationship between immigration and electoral gains percolates to mayoral election at the municipality level; (iv) cultural diversity, competition in the labor market and for public services, and political competition are the most relevant channels at work.
We combine community-level outcomes of 27 votes about immigration issues in Switzerland with census data to estimate the effect of immigration on natives' attitudes towards immigration. We apply an instrumental variable approach to take potentially endogenous locational choices into account, and we categorize immigrants into two groups according to the cultural values and beliefs of their source country to understand how the cultural distance between natives and immigrants affects this relationship. We find that the share of culturally different immigrants is a significant and sizable determinant of anti-immigration votes, while the presence of culturally similar immigrants does not affect natives' voting behavior at all in most specifications. The cultural distance between immigrant and native residents thus appears crucial in explaining the causal effect of immigration on natives' attitudes towards immigration, and we argue that the differential impact is mainly driven by natives' concerns about compositional amenities. We finally show that the elasticity of the share of right-wing votes in favor of the Swiss People's Party is much more elastic with respect to the share of culturally different immigrants than natives' attitudes themselves, suggesting that the party has disproportionally gained from changes in attitudes caused by immigrant inflows.
I study the impact of immigration and ethnic diversity on political outcomes in immigrant-receiving countries, focusing on the case of election outcomes and immigration in Danish municipalities 1981-2001. A rich set of control variables isolates ethnic diversity effects from those of other immigrant characteristics and a novel IV strategy based on historical housing stock data addresses issues of endogenous location choice of immigrants. Immigration-driven increases in ethnic diversity improve electoral outcomes for anti-immigrant nationalist parties. Increased nationalist success comes primarily at the expense of traditional left-wing parties, although to a lesser extent possibly also at the expense of the non-nationalist right-wing parties. The effects of immigration and ethnic diversity do not seem to differ between municipal and national elections, despite the very different issues decided at the two levels of government.
This paper investigates the causal link between the ethnic diversity in a society and its inhabitants’ preferences for redistribution. We exploit exogenous variation in immigrant shares stemming from a nationwide program placing refugees in municipalities throughout Sweden during 1985–94 and match data on refugee placement to panel survey data on inhabitants of the receiving municipalities. We find significant, negative effects of increased immigration on the support for redistribution. The effect is especially pronounced among high-income earners. We also establish that estimates from earlier studies failing to identify causal effects are likely to be positively biased (i.e., less negative).
This paper studies the impact of immigration on public education expenditures in EU-15 countries. Identification comes from the use of the 1990s Balkan wars (in Bosnia and Kosovo) as a source of exogenous variation in immigrant inflows to mitigate a possible Tiebout-type bias from endogenous mobility. An increase in foreign population is found to have a small negative effect on public education expenditures. The elasticity of education spending with respect to immigrant population share is −.15. The negative relationship between immigration and public spending on education is consistent with the empirical literature showing evidence on low levels of public good provision in heterogeneous and ethnic diverse societies.
This paper provides new evidence on the effect of immigration on election outcomes. Our analysis makes use of data on city districts in Hamburg, Germany, during a period of substantial inflows of immigrants and asylum seekers. We find significant and robust effects for changes in foreigner shares on the electoral success of parties that built up a distinctive reputation in immigration politics. In particular, our fixed-effects estimates indicate a positive effect for xenophobic, extreme right-wing parties and an adverse effect for the Green party that actively campaigned for liberal immigration policies and minority rights. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that changes in local compositional amenities shape individual attitudes towards immigration. --
Methodological problems associated with selection bias and interaction effects have hindered the accumulation of systematic knowledge about the factors that explain cross-national variation in the success of extreme right parties. The author uses a statistical analysis that takes account of these problems to examine the effect of electoral institutions, unemployment, and immigration on the support for these parties. The data set used in this analysis is new and spans 19 countries and 165 national elections. There are four substantive conclusions. The first is that it is important to distinguish between neofascist and populist parties on the extreme right because their fortunes depend on different factors. The second is that populist parties do better in countries where the district magnitude is larger and more seats are allocated in upper tiers. The third is that although immigration has a positive effect on populist parties irrespective of the unemployment level, unemployment only matters when immigration is high. Finally, there is evidence that the permissiveness of the electoral system mediates the effect of immigration on populist parties.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, ethnic Germans living in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were given the opportunity to migrate to Germany. Within 15 years, 2.8 million individuals had done so. Upon arrival, these immigrants were exogenously allocated to different regions to ensure an even distribution across the country. Their inflow can therefore be seen as a quasi-experiment of immigration. I analyze the effect of these inflows on skill-specific employment rates and wages. The results indicate a displacement effect of 3.1 unemployed workers for every 10 immigrants that find a job, but no effect on relative wages.
Using detailed micro data on earnings and employment, I analyze the effects of immigration on the wage distribution of native male workers in Austria. I find that immigration has heterogeneous effects on wages, differing by type of work as well as the wage level. While there are small , but insignificant, negative effects for blue collar workers at the lower end of the wage distribution there are positive effects on wages at higher percentiles. For white collar workers positive effects occur at most percentiles. The estimated effects of immigration are relatively small in size and not significant for most workers. Overall it seems that most of potentially adverse effects of immigration on natives' wages are offset by complementarities stemming from immigration of workers with different skill levels.
In this paper, we analyze the determination of immigration policy in a direct democracy setting. We formulate a model of voting and participation behavior integrating instrumental and expressive motivations. The model is estimated using data drawn from a survey carried out after a vote in Switzerland in 2000 on a popular initiative proposing to implement immigration restrictions. The model enables us to recover estimates of participation costs and preferences towards immigration and analyze how these preferences are translated into actual voting outcomes. The results reveal a substantial gap (“participation bias”) between attitudes towards immigration in the general population (43% favorable to restrictions) and the outcome of the vote (26%).Highlights► We analyze the determination of immigration policy in a direct democracy setting. ► We formulate a structural model of voting and participation behavior. ► Data are drawn from a survey carried out after a vote in Switzerland in 2000. ► Human capital is an important determinant of attitudes towards immigration. ► There is a substantial gap between vote outcome and attitudes towards immigration.
We examine the systemic conditions that have influenced the electoral success of parties of the extreme right in West European politics from 1970 through 1990. Empirical estimates based on 103 elections in sixteen countries suggest that electoral and party-system factors interact with each other to generate conditions conducive to these parties. Specifically, increasing electoral thresholds dampen support for the extreme right as the number of parliamentary parties expands. At the same time, multi-partism increasingly fosters parties of the extreme right with rising electoral proportionality. Our analyses also indicate that higher rates of unemployment provide a favourable environment for these political movements. These results suggest that levels of electoral support for the extreme right are sensitive to factors that can be modified through policy instruments.
Research on the voters of the extreme right in Western Europe has become a minor industry, but relatively little attention has been paid to the twin question of why support for these parties is often unstable, and why the extreme right is so weak in many countries. Moreover, the findings from different studies often contradict each other. This article aims at providing a more comprehensive and satisfactory answer to this research problem by employing a broader database and a more adequate modeling strategy. The main finding is that while immigration and unemployment rates are important, their interaction with other political factors is much more complex than suggested by previous research. Moreover, persistent country effects prevail even if a whole host of individual and contextual variables is controlled for.
This paper develops a model of the interaction between the supply of hate-creating stories from politicians and the willingness
of voters to listen to hatred. Hatred is fostered with stories of an out-group's crimes, but the impact of these stories comes
from repetition not truth. Hate-creating stories are supplied by politicians when such actions help to discredit opponents
whose policies benefit an out-group. Egalitarians foment hatred against rich minorities; opponents of re-distribution build
hatred against poor minorities. Hatred relies on people accepting, rather than investigating, hate-creating stories. Hatred
declines when there is private incentive to learn the truth. Increased economic interactions with a minority group may provide
that incentive. This framework is used to illuminate the evolution of anti-Black hatred in the United States South, episodes
of anti-Semitism in Europe, and the recent surge of anti-Americanism in the Arab world.
Past research has emphasized two critical economic concerns that appear to generate anti-immigrant sentiment among native citizens: concerns about labor market competition and concerns about the fiscal burden on public services. We provide direct tests of both models of attitude formation using an original survey experiment embedded in a nationwide U.S. survey. The labor market competition model predicts that natives will be most opposed to immigrants who have similar skill levels to their own. We find instead that both low skilled and highly skilled natives strongly prefer highly skilled immigrants over low skilled immigrants, and this preference is not decreasing in natives' skill levels. The fiscal burden model anticipates that rich natives oppose low skilled immigration more than poor natives, and that this gap is larger in states with greater fiscal exposure (in terms of immigrant access to public services). We find instead that rich and poor natives are equally opposed to low skilled immigration, and rich natives are actually less opposed to low skilled immigration in states with more fiscal exposure than they are elsewhere. We do find that poor natives are more opposed to low skilled immigration in states with greater fiscal exposure than elsewhere, suggesting that concerns about access to or overcrowding of public services contributes to anti-immigrant attitudes.
West European right-wing extremist parties have received a great deal of attention over the past two decades due to their electoral success. What has received less coverage, however, is the fact that these parties have not enjoyed a consistent level of electoral support across Western Europe during this period. This article puts forward an explanation of the variation in the right-wing extremist party vote across Western Europe that incorporates a wider range of factors than have been considered previously. It begins by examining the impact of socio-demographic variables on the right-wing extremist party vote. Then, it turns its attention to a whole host of structural factors that may potentially affect the extreme right party vote, including institutional, party-system and conjunctural variables. The article concludes with an assessment of which variables have the most power in explaining the uneven electoral success of right-wing extremist parties across Western Europe. The findings go some way towards challenging the conventional wisdom as to how the advance of the parties of the extreme right may be halted.
In this study we explain extreme right-wing voting behaviour in the countries of the European Union and Norway from a micro and macro perspective. Using a multidisciplinary multilevel approach, we take into account individual-level social background characteristics and public opinion alongside country characteristics and characteristics of extreme right-wing parties themselves. By making use of large-scale survey data (N = 49,801) together with country-level statistics and expert survey data, we are able to explain extreme right-wing voting behaviour from this multilevel perspective. Our results show that cross-national differences in support of extreme right-wing parties are particularly due to differences in public opinion on immigration and democracy, the number of non-Western residents in a country and, above all, to party characteristics of the extreme right-wing parties themselves.
I examine the effects of the ethnic enclave size on labor market outcomes of immigrants. I account for ability sorting into enclaves by exploiting a Danish spatial dispersal policy under which refugees were randomly dispersed across locations. First, I find strong evidence that refugees with unfavorable unobserved characteristics self-select into ethnic enclaves. Second, a relative standard deviation increase in the ethnic enclave size increases annual earnings by 18% on average, irrespective of skill level. Third, further findings are consistent with the explanation that ethnic networks disseminate job information, which increases the job-worker match quality and thereby the hourly wage rate. (c) 2009 by The University of Chicago.
This paper exploits a natural experiment to study the influence of regional factors on initial and subsequent location choices among immigrants. The results suggest that immigrants to Sweden are attracted to regions with high representation from the individual's birth country and large overall immigrant populations. Labour market opportunities affect location decisions, but people also tend to choose localities with many welfare recipients. The impact of most regional factors does not change over time. Thus, there is little evidence that information improves or that preferences differ between initial and subsequent stages.
Is there a local economic impact of immigration? Immigration pushes up rents and housing values in US destination cities. The positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas. I use instrumental variables based on a “shift-share” of national levels of immigration into metropolitan areas. An immigration inflow equal to 1% of a city's population is associated with increases in average rents and housing values of about 1%. The results suggest an economic impact that is an order of magnitude bigger than that found in labor markets.
In this paper we examine the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990-2003. Drawing on police administrative data, we first document that the size of immigrant population is positively correlated with the incidence of most types of crime, as well as with the overall number of criminal offenses. However, using changes of immigrant population in other European countries to identify exogenous shifts of immigrant population in Italy, the causal effect seems limited to some categories of crime: murders, robberies and, to a lesser extent, thefts.
The theory of factor demand has important implications for the study of the impact of immigration on wages. This paper derives the theoretical implications in the context of a general equilibrium model where the wage impact depends on the elasticity of product demand, the rate at which the consumer base expands as immigrants enter the receiving country, the elasticity of supply of capital, and the elasticity of substitution among inputs of production. The constraints imposed by the theory can be used to check the plausibility of the many contradictory claims that appear throughout the immigration literature.
JEL codes
J23; J61; F22
There is a long-standing debate among academics about the effect of immigration on native internal migration decisions. If immigrants displace natives this may indicate a direct cost of immigration in the form of decreased employment opportunity for native workers. Moreover, displacement would also imply that cross-region analyses of wage effects systematically underestimate the consequences of immigration. The widespread use of such area studies for the US and other countries makes it especially important to know whether a native internal response to immigration truly occurs. This paper introduces a microsimulation methodology to test for inherent bias in regression models that have been used in the literature. We show that some specifications have built biases into their models, thereby casting doubt on the validity of their results. We then provide a brief empirical analysis with a panel of observed US state-by-skill data. Together, our evidence argues against the existence of native displacement. This implies that cross-region analyses of immigration's effect on wages are still informative.
We investigate the effect of immigrants' marriage behavior on dropout from education. To identify the causal effect, we exploit a recent Danish policy reform that generated exogenous variation in marriage behavior by a complete abolishment of marriage migration for immigrants below 24 years. The reform influenced immigrants from countries with a high historical rate of marriage migration more than immigrants from country groups with a low rate. We find that the dropout rate for males increases by 25 percentage points as a consequence of marriage to a marriage migrant, whereas the effect for females is small and mostly insignificant. Copyright © The editors of the "Scandinavian Journal of Economics" 2009. .
We show that immigrant managers are substantially more likely to hire immigrants than are native managers. The finding holds when comparing establishments in the same 5-digit industry and location, when comparing different establishments within the same firm, when analyzing establishments that change management over time, and when accounting for within-establishment trends in recruitment patterns. The effects are largest for small and owner-managed establishments in the for-profit sector. Separations are more frequent when workers and managers have dissimilar origin, but only before workers become protected by EPL. We also find that native managers are unbiased in their recruitments of former co-workers, suggesting that information deficiencies are important. We find no effects on entry wages. Our findings suggest that a low frequency of immigrant managers may contribute to the observed disadvantages of immigrant workers.
This paper develops a model of the interaction between the supply of hatecreating stories from politicians and the willingness of voters to listen to hatred. Hatred is fostered with stories of an out-group's crimes, but the impact of these stories comes from repetition not truth. Hate-creating stories are supplied by politicians when such actions help to discredit opponents whose policies benefit an out-group. Egalitarians foment hatred against rich minorities; opponents of redistribution build hatred against poor minorities. Hatred relies on people accepting, rather than investigating, hate-creating stories. Hatred declines when there is private incentive to learn the truth. Increased economic interactions with a minority group may provide that incentive. This framework is used to illuminate the evolution of anti-Black hatred in the United States South, episodes of antiSemitism in Europe, and the recent surge of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. © 2005 MIT Press
Immigration is not evenly balanced across groups of workers who have the same education but differ in their work experience,
and the nature of the supply imbalance changes over time. This paper develops a new approach for estimating the labor market
impact of immigration by exploiting this variation in supply shifts across education-experience groups. I assume that similarly
educated workers with different levels of experience participate in a national labor market and are not perfect substitutes.
The analysis indicates that immigration lowers the wage of competing workers: a 10 percent increase in supply reduces wages
by 3 to 4 percent.
This paper attempts to identify job networks among Mexican migrants in the U. S. labor market. The empirical analysis uses
data on migration patterns and labor market outcomes, based on a sample of individuals belonging to multiple origin-communities
in Mexico, over a long period of time. Each community's network is measured by the proportion of the sampled individuals who
are located at the destination (the United States) in any year. We verify that the same individual is more likely to be employed
and to hold a higher paying nonagricultural job when his network is exogenously larger, by including individual fixed effects
in the employment and occupation regressions and by using rainfall in the origin-community as an instrument for the size of
the network at the destination.
Using the UK Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities, we document differences in integration patterns between Muslims and non-Muslims. We find that Muslims integrate less and more slowly than non-Muslims. In terms of estimated probability of having a strong religious identity, a Muslim born in the UK and having spent there more than 30 years is comparable with a non-Muslim just arrived in the country. Moreover, higher levels of income as well as higher on-the-job qualifications seem to be associated with a stronger religious identity for Muslim immigrants only. Finally, we find no evidence that segregated neighborhoods breed intense religious and cultural identities for ethnic minorities, in general, and, in particular, for Muslims. (JEL: A14, J15) (c) 2008 by the European Economic Association.
Mexican immigrants were historically clustered in a few cities, mainly in California and Texas. During the past 15 years, however, arrivals from Mexico established sizeable immigrant communities in many “new” cities. We explore the causes and consequences of the widening geographic diffusion of Mexican immigrants. A combination of demand-pull and supply push factors explains most of the inter-city variation in inflows of Mexican immigrants over the 1990s, and also illuminates the most important trend in the destination choices of new Mexican immigrants – the move away from Los Angeles. Mexican inflows raise the relative supply of low-education labor in a city, leading to the question of how cities adapt to these shifts. One mechanism, suggested by the Hecksher Olin model, is shifting industry composition. We find limited evidence of this mechanism: most of the increases in the relative supply of loweducation labor are absorbed by changes in skill intensity within narrowly defined industries. Such adjustments could be readily explained if Mexican immigrant inflows had large effects on the relative wage structures of different cities. As has been found in previous studies of the local impacts of immigration, however, our analysis suggests that relative wage adjustments are small.
"Analyzing the location choices of the post-1964 U.S. immigrants results in three main findings: (1) these immigrants are more geographically concentrated than natives of the same age and ethnicity and reside in cities with large ethnic populations; (2) education plays a key role in location choice, reducing geographic concentration and the likelihood of being in cities with a high concentration of fellow countrymen and increasing the probability of changing locations after arrival in the United States; (3) internal migration within the United States occurs more frequently among immigrants than natives and facilitates the process of assimilation for the more educated individuals."
This paper documents where immigrants who enter the U.S. with different types of visas ("green cards") choose to live initially and what determines those location choices. Using population data on immigrants from the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1971 to 2000, matched to data on state characteristics from the Integrated Public Use Microsamples of the U.S. Census, I estimate conditional logit models with the 48 contiguous U.S. states as the choice set. Like previous researchers, I estimate that immigrants have a higher probability of moving to states where individuals from their region of birth represent a larger share of the state population, with relatives of legal permanent residents responding most to this factor. I also find that, in general, immigrants in all admission categories respond to labor market conditions when choosing where to live, but that these effects were the largest for male employment-based immigrants and, surprisingly, refugees.