Limited backlash? Assessing the geographic scope of electoral responses to refugees

Recent research suggests that local exposure to refugees does not increase support for far-right parties. We challenge this null result by drawing on granular data from Berlin in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis. While prior work in the German context has generally assumed that refugee exposure is exogenous at the local level, we demonstrate that refugee housing was disproportionately concentrated in neighborhoods with young, non-citizen residents. To address this selection bias, we harmonize in-person and mail-in precinct boundaries across elections and implement a difference-in-differences design with synthetic precincts. We find that localized exposure to refugee housing did increase support for the far-right in the 2017 federal elections. However, this backlash is geographically narrow in scope. Our findings nuance prior research by demonstrating that even if sociotropic concerns dominate electoral responses to the refugee crisis, voters’ responses are consistent with group threat theory at the local level.