Immigration and Electoral Outcomes

During the second half of 2015, Germany witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of refugees. In the first elections after this mass arrival of refugees, right-wing populist parties, most notably the Alternative for Germany (AfD), won significant shares of the popular vote. Using unique data on refugee populations and their type of accommodation at the municipality level, the paper presented in this ZEW Research Seminar investigates the effects of the 2015 refugee inflow on the outcomes of the state elections held in March 2016 in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. For identification, the author makes use of the fact that the “German refugee crisis” served as a natural experiment, in which the sheer necessity to accommodate the large number of refugees led to exogeneous variation in the allocation of refugees across municipalities. Results based on fixed effects estimations show that an increase in the population share of refugees increases the vote share of right-wing parties and decreases the vote share of the incumbent federal government parties. However, the estimated electoral effects of the refugee inflow are small and solely driven by municipalities that host large reception centers for refugees.