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.

Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration

“…Second, a growing set of studies has investigated the e¤ects of immigration on electoral outcomes in receiving countries (Barone et al, 2016;Dustmann et al, 2016;Halla et al, 2017). 8 The main contribution of my paper is to analyze jointly the economic and political impact of an episode of mass migration in a uni…ed empirical framework.…”

Happily Ever after: Immigration, Natives’ Marriage, and Fertility

“…Alongside these trends, a heated debate on the economic, social, and political consequences of immigration has often emerged (Porter, 2017). A large body of the literature has investigated the effects of immigration, exploring how immigrants affect natives' wages and employment on the one hand (Card, 2001;Borjas, 2003;Borjas and Katz, 2007;Ottaviano and Peri, 2012), and political outcomes and electoral results on the other (Mayda et al, 2016;Halla et al, 2017). Somewhat surprisingly, however, much less is known about the impact of immigration on key social outcomes, such as marriage rates, fertility, and family formation among natives.…”

Labor Market Competition with Immigrants and Political Polarization

“…Our analysis of the vote shares provides evidence for the protectionist response (see also Halla et al, Forthcoming;Harmon, 2014;Sørensen, 2015). 2 A standard deviation increase in the share of immigrants within the skill cell is associated with a two percentage points increase in FrP's vote share, and decreasing vote shares for FrP's main competitors on the left (Ap, Labor) as well as on the right (H, the Conservative Party).…”

“…1 In the popular press, the rise of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Jeremy Corbyn, as well as Brexit, has frequently been interpreted as signs of political polarization. The role of globalization, in particular trade and immigration, have gained center stage in the discussions of why this development takes place (Autor et al, 2016;Halla et al, Forthcoming). In this paper, we study the role of immigration, in particular its labor market consequences.…”

“…The previous empirical literature may be classified according to how they define the relevant labor market when identifying who competes with immigrants. One popular approach is to deduce the competition effect from the spatial correlation between the proportion of immigrants and vote shares (e.g., Halla et al, Forthcoming;Harmon, 2014;Sørensen, 2015). Other studies observe labor market penetration of immigrants along occupational and/or sectorial divisions within the same country (Burgoon et al, 2012;Dancygier and Donnelly, 2013).…”