Immigration, Ethnic Diversity, and Political Outcomes: Evidence from Denmark

Abstract

I study the impact of immigration and increasing ethnic diversity on political outcomes in immigrant‐receiving countries, focusing on immigration and election outcomes in Danish municipalities between 1981 and 2001. A novel instrumental variable strategy based on historical housing stock data addresses issues of endogenous location choices of immigrants and a rich set of control variables is employed to isolate ethnic diversity effects from those of other immigrant characteristics. Increases in local ethnic diversity lead to rightward shifts in election outcomes by shifting electoral support away from traditional “big government” left‐wing parties and towards anti‐immigrant nationalist parties. This holds for both local and national elections.

Immigration and local spending in social services: evidence from a massive immigration wave

“…Hence, we resort to an instrumental variables approach. The type of housing available in a city has been found to be an important driver of immigrants' location choices in European countries such as Denmark (Damm 2009;Harmon 2014), France (Verdugo 2014) and Italy (Boeri et al 2015). The instrument that we will use exploits the characteristics of the housing stock in 1991 to predict where the immigrants will locate in the period 1998-2006.…”

“…The type of housing available is an important determinant of immigrants' location choices (see e.g. Damm 2009;Harmon 2014;Boeri et al 2015;Verdugo 2016). We follow Harmon (2014) and use long-lagged housing characteristics to predict immigrants' location choices 3 .…”

“…Damm 2009;Harmon 2014;Boeri et al 2015;Verdugo 2016). We follow Harmon (2014) and use long-lagged housing characteristics to predict immigrants' location choices 3 . Specifically, the instrument that we use exploits the distribution of rental housing in 1991 to predict where the immigrants locate in the period [1998][1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006].…”

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).…”

“…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).…”