Shielding Voters? How Partisanship Shapes the Placement of Refugee Housing Facilities

Abstract

Europe has experienced a sharp increase in humanitarian arrivals. In response, many countries have adopted dispersal policies to proportionally allocate asylum seekers across national territory. Examining a prominent case --- the Syrian refugee protection crisis in Germany --- this paper demonstrates that ostensibly bureaucratic dispersal policies may nevertheless be structured by local political competition. Specifically, we find that the county governments tasked with implementing the dispersal policy systematically select municipalities dominated by electoral opponents to host group accommodation facilities. Although the policy was designed to distribute asylum seekers according to population and tax revenue, the center-right's control over the majority of county councils resulted in a concentration of refugee housing within left-leaning municipalities. Our findings, which suggest that refugee exposure can be endogenous to local politics, provide a potential explanation for why refugee inflows have been found to have a negligible impact on the electoral performance of incumbents in many receiving states.