Does immigration decrease far-right popularity? Evidence from Finnish municipalities
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Does immigration decrease far-right popularity? Evidence from Finnish municipalities Jakub Lonsky1 Received: 2 May 2019 / Accepted: 10 June 2020 / © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Across Europe, far-right parties have made significant electoral gains in recent years. Their anti-immigration stance is considered one of the main factors behind their success. Using data from Finland, this paper studies the effect of immigration on voting for the far-right Finns Party on a local level. Exploiting a convenient setup for a shiftshare instrument, I find that a 1 percentage point increase in the share of foreign citizens in a municipality decreases the Finns Party’s vote share by 3.4 percentage points. Placebo tests using pre-period data confirm this effect is not driven by persistent trends at the municipality level. The far-right votes lost to immigration are captured by the two pro-immigration parties. Turning to potential mechanisms, immigration is found to increase voter turnout, potentially activating local pro-immigration voters. Moreover, the negative effect is only present in municipalities with high initial exposure to immigrants, consistent with the intergroup contact theory. Finally, I also provide some evidence for the welfare-state channel as a plausible mechanism behind the main result. Keywords Immigration · Far-right · Political economy · Voting JEL Classification H71 · J15 · J61 · P16
Responsible editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann Jakub Lonsky
[email protected] 1
Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford, 58 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6QS, UK
J. Lonsky
1 Introduction The popularity of far-right (sometimes also referred to as populist radical right)1 parties across Europe has been rising rapidly in recent years. The latest political developments in Europe—such as the UK’s exit from the European Union—suggest that the surge of the far-right could have significant negative economic and political consequences for the entire continent. The rise of the far-right appears to be driven—in large part—by immigration. Since the early 1990s, Europe has experienced significant migration flows. First was the East to West migration from post-communist countries that began with the fall of the Soviet Union, and accelerated after the EU enlargements in the 2000s. Recent years saw a large inflow of asylum seekers from Asia and Africa fueled by a number of armed conflicts. Both of these immigration shocks likely kindled anti-immigrant sentiments across the continent, contributing to an unprecedented wave of electoral success among far-right parties. This paper studies the effect of immigration on voting for the far-right on a local (municipality) level. This micro effect is facilitated through the personal contact between natives and immigrants as well as the perceived impact of foreign in-migration on local communities. By contrast, the macro effect of national immigrant inflows refers to the salience of migration in the national social and political discourse.2 The micro-level impact of immigrants on
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