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

Many European countries have adopted dispersal policies to proportionally allocate refugees across their territories. In this paper, we draw on a novel dataset of refugee housing locations during the Syrian refugee crisis in Germany to assess how a prominent dispersal policy was implemented in practice. Although the policy was designed to distribute refugees according to population and tax revenue, our results show that county governments frequently deviated from this mandate and concentrated housing in municipalities dominated by political opponents. Given the center-right's predominant control over county councils, this resulted in a concentration of refugee housing in left-leaning municipalities. Our findings illustrate how NIMBY dynamics can distort ostensibly bureaucratic humanitarian policies, with downstream implications for refugee integration. In addition, these findings also suggest researchers examining the relationship between refugee contact and political behavior should be cautious when assuming that local exposure is as-if randomly assigned in countries with dispersal policies.