Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/298684 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] IZA Journal of Development and Migration [ISSN:] 2520-1786 [Volume:] 11 [Issue:] 1 [Article No.:] 13 [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 1-20
Publisher: 
Sciendo, Warsaw
Abstract: 
This article studies whether immigration in voter's neighborhoods is a driving factor of the rise of Germany's major right-wing party Alternative fuer Deutschland (AFD) and the decline of Angela Merkel's center ruling party the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). We use the 2015 refugee crisis as a natural experiment to study the short-run impact of refugee presence on the voting behavior in German municipalities. This is the first study to use a spatial econometric framework combining small-scale immigration data, election data, and a set of socioeconomic factors. Our main finding states that the local immigration boosted AFD votes but did not affect CDU votes directly. Instead, in regions that perceived immigration indirectly, that is in neighboring municipalities, the CDU gained fewer votes.
Subjects: 
Voting behaviour
immigration
unemployment
refugee crisis management
socioeconomic inequality
demographics
JEL: 
H120
J1
J110
J150
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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