Shifting media diets are increasingly viewed as a key driver of political polarization. In particular, prior research has focused on greater choice between partisan outlets and the rise of online news. This paper sheds light on a heretofore understudied yet equally salient development: the decline of local news. We argue that local news exits can induce polarization by increasing exposure to news about national politics, where partisan and ideological differences are more salient than at the local level. To test our argument, we draw on a novel panel data set of the coverage areas of all German news- papers between 1980 and 2009. Using a difference-in-differences design, we demonstrate that local news exits increase electoral polarization. Consistent with our theoretical argument, we also find that local news exits lead to increased consumption of national news, higher degrees of partisan identification, and increased political engagement at the individual level.
A growing literature studies how natural disasters affect political attitudes towards climate change. In this paper, we examine the electoral effects of major flood that occurred just two months prior to the 2021 German federal election. Using a difference-in-differences design in conjunction with municipal--level voting data, we analyze how local exposure to the flood affected support for the Green Party -- the party most closely associated with policies that address climate change. Our results reveal pronounced differences between the two most affected states. In the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, we find no evidence that the flood affected Green Party support. In the neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate, we show that the flood increased the Green Party vote share by more than two percentage points. We then provide additional support for these results through synthetic control analyses of the most heavily affected localities in each state. Our results suggest that incumbency moderates the relationship between extreme weather events and Green Party support.
How do freedom of movement restrictions affect refugee integration? While a growing body of research studies the initial allocation of refugees, there is little causal evidence on subsequent policies that restrict residential mobility. We study a contentious law in Germany, which barred newly arrived refugees from relocating to a location different from the one they were assigned to. To identify the causal effect of the movement restriction on integration, we utilize a sharp date cutoff that governs whether refugees are affected by the policy. We demonstrate that restricting freedom of movement had pronounced negative effects on refugees' sense of belonging in Germany, while increasing identification with their home countries. In addition, the policy decreased social engagement, but had no detectable effects on contact with natives or co-ethnics. We argue that detrimental effects stem from the fact that discriminatory policies send a negative signal about the inclusiveness of the host society.
This study examines the relationship between crimes attributed to immigrants and hate crimes against refugees at the local level. We argue that localized crime events attributed to immigrants can lead natives to exact retribution against uninvolved out-group members. We investigate such intergroup conflict dynamics between immigrants and natives in Germany, a country that has in recent years experienced a sharp increase in both the foreign-born population and hate crimes. Our empirical analysis leverages fine-grained geo-coded data on more than 9,400 hate crimes and 60,000 immigrant-attributed crime events between 2015 and 2019. Using a regression discontinuity in time design (RDiT), we show that the daily probability of hate crimes doubles in the immediate aftermath of an immigrant crime event in a local community. Additional evidence points to mobilization rather than legitimization as a likely mechanism. Our results speak to growing concerns about xenophobic violence in Western democracies.
Did indirect community-level exposure to WW1 casualties facilitate the rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany? Mass warfare can promote nationalist attitudes outside of active combat zones by amplifying in-group preferences of returning veterans and relatives affected by traumatic loss. We investigate such localized effects of WW1 on interwar Germany. We combine data on the birthplaces of over 7.5 million war casualties with county-level election results, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in death rates for causal identification. We document a robust and substantial positive effect of indirect war exposure on the Nazi vote share. Analyses of party entries, the role of war monuments, and Nazi autobiographies suggest that war losses foster a stronger in-group orientation of highly war affected communities. These findings advance our understanding of the local impact of WW1 on the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the longer-term legacies of indirect exposure to violence on preferences for nationalist ideologies.
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