The European refugee crisis and political outcomes

In the upcoming second edition of the textbook, we include more analysis of the European refugee crisis.

Box 12.1

The European refugee crisis began unfolding in 2015 when tens of thousands of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa fled their homelands and headed north. This influx of new refugees provides even more case studies of how new refugee populations affected political outcomes in Europe. Christian Dustmann,Kristine Vasiljeva and Anna Damm (2019) analyze effect of refugees on electoral outcomes in Denmark, where refugees are allocated randomly by the Danish government. Unlike economic migrants, refugees usually do not have a say in which region of a country they will reside, at least initially. (This is not the case in the United States, where resettlement agencies take into consideration the specific characteristics of the refugees, such as networks of former immigrants from similar countries of origin and availability of local programs to meet the needs of the specific refugee group). The random allocation of refugees across different municipalities in Denmark avoids issues with selection bias (the Appendix to Chapter 8 discusses selection bias). The researchers find that refugee allocations have large effects on voting outcomes: Right-wing parties experience a 1.3 to 2.3 percentage point increase in vote shares (which varies across different levels of government) in response to a 1 percentage point increase in refugees. Overall, there is a shift in the distribution of votes from parties on the left to parties on the right in municipalities with more refugees. However, for the largest municipalities, the response is the reverse: More refugees lead to fewer votes for anti-immigrant parties, suggesting a divide among urban and rural areas.

Dustmann, C., Vasiljeva, K., and Piil Damm, A. (2019) “Refugee migration and electoral outcomes.” Review of Economic Studies 86(5), pp. 2035–2091. DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdy047.