IMMIGRATION AND VOTING FOR THE
FAR RIGHT
Martin Halla
University of Innsbruck
Alexander F. Wagner
Swiss Finance Institute – University
of Zurich
Josef Zweim
¨
uller
University of Zurich
Abstract
Does the presence of immigrants in one’s neighborhood affect voting for far right-wing parties? We
study the case of the Freedom Party of Austria (FP
¨
O) that, under the leadership of J
¨
org Haider,
increased its vote share from less than 5% in the early 1980s to 27% by the end of the 1990s
and continued to attract more than 20% of voters in the 2013 national election. We find t hat the
inflow of immigrants into a community has a significant impact on the increase in the community’s
voting share for the FP
¨
O, explaining roughly a tenth of the regional variation in vote changes. Our
results suggest that voters worry about adverse labor market effects of immigration, as well as about
the quality of their neighborhood. In fact, we find evidence of a negative impact of immigration
on “compositional amenities”. In communities with larger immigration influx, Austrian children
commute longer distances to school, and fewer daycare resources are provided. We do not find
evidence that Austrians move out of communities with increasing immigrant presence. (JEL: P16,
J61)
The editor in charge of this paper was M. Daniele Paserman.
Acknowledgments: We thank the Editor M. Daniele Paserman and four anonymous Referees for excellent
comments that significantly improved the paper. We thank Statistics Austria for providing the census data.
For helpful discussions and comments we thank Stefan Bauernschuster, David Card, Albrecht Glitz, Michel
Habib, Helmut Rainer, Friedrich Schneider, Davide Ticchi, Andrea Weber, Hannes Winner, Rudolf Winter-
Ebmer, and participants of several conferences, seminars, and workshops. We thank Thomas Schober for
excellent research assistance. This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): National
Research Network S103, The Austrian Center for Labor Economics a nd the Analysis of the Welfare State;
the NCCR FINRISK and the UHZ RPP Finance and Financial Markets. Previous versions of this paper
were circulated under the titles “On the Political Implications of Immigration” and “Does Immigration
into Their Neighborhoods Incline Voters Toward the Extreme Right? The Case of the Freedom Party
of Austria.” Halla is a Research Fellow at IZA; Wagner is a Research Fellow at CEPR and a Research
Associate at ECGI; Zweim
¨
uller is a Research Fellow at CEPR, CESifo, and IZA.
E-mail: martin.halla@uibk.ac.at (Halla); alexander.wagner@bf.uzh.ch (Wagner);
josef.zweimueller@econ.uzh.ch (Zweim
¨
uller)
Journal of the European Economic Association 2017 15(6):1341–1385 DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvx003
c
The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of European Economic Association.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
1342 Journal of the European Economic Association
1. Introduction
Voters in many European countries—including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France,
Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—have
expressed strong support for far-right and right-wing populist political parties in recent
elections. This is a noteworthy change compared to the 1970s until the mid-1980s, when
hardly any far-right party had gained more than 5% in a general election. Economic
policy is shaped by these parties. Moreover, some of these parties have extreme
tendencies. History reminds us that the rise of extreme parties within a democratic
environment can put democracy itself at risk (Almond and Verba 1965; Dahl 1989).
Explaining the success of far-right parties is, therefore, clearly an important issue.
Although far-right parties are quite heterogeneous, they share a number of
ideological features (Mudde 1996). In particular, they all have fierce anti-immigration
programs, which often become their main focus. Thus, immigration is a natural
candidate for explaining the success of these parties. At the time of this writing,
an unprecedented inflow of immigrants into Europe is occurring. It is unlikely that
this inflow is going to stop on its own. Instead, limits on immigration are now widely
discussed and partially implemented. Casual observation suggests that far-right parties
throughout Europe are at least temporarily benefiting from voters’ worries regarding
this inflow. This casual observation on current events is supported by suggestive
historical evidence, presented in Figure 1, which suggests a positive relationship
between the share of immigrants in a population and the support for far-right parties.
Taking country fixed effects into account, the correlation between the immigrant share
and the existing far-right vote share is 0.53. When considering also countries where
no far-right parties exist, the correlation is 0.30.
This paper investigates whether immigration in voters’ neighborhoods is a driving
force of the rise of far-right parties. Although the cross-country evidence suggests a
positive relationship, it may be that enhanced contact with immigrants improves mutual
understanding and fosters an appreciation of different viewpoints (Allport 1954). This
may lead to a negative relationship between immigration and support for the far right.
Understanding the political consequences of immigration is a central prerequisite for
the formulation of intelligent policy proposals.
We look at the case of the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei
¨
Osterreichs,FP
¨
O), which generated substantial international attention. Until the early
1980s, the FP
¨
O was a small party with a vote share (in elections to the national
parliament) of around 5%. When J
¨
org Haider became the party leader in 1986, the
nationalists within the party, favoring an anti-immigration stance, prevailed over its
business-friendly, libertarian wing. A nationalistic and anti-immigration approach has
characterized the party’s platform ever since. From 1986 onward, the FP
¨
O steadily
increased its vote share and became the country’s second-largest party by the end of
the 1990s. In the national elections of 1999 the FP
¨
O gained almost 27% of the votes.
In 2000, the FP
¨
O joined with the conservative Austrian People’s Party (
¨
OVP) to form
a coalition government that was in power until 2006. In 2002, this coalition enacted
a set of more restrictive immigration laws (including, for example, requirements that
Halla, Wagner, and Zweim
¨
uller Immigration and Voting for the Far Right 1343
at70at71
at75
at79
at83
at86
at90
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at95
at99
at02
at06
at08
at13
be71 be74be77
be78
be81
be85
be87
be91
be95
be99
be03
be07
be10
dk79
dk81
dk84
dk87
dk88
dk90dk94
dk98
dk01
dk05
dk07
dk11
fi83
fi87
fi91
fi95fi99fi03
fi07
fr12
de87
de90
de94
de98
de02
de05
de09
de13
gr00
gr04
gr07
it87
it92
it94
it96
it01
it06
it08
nl86
nl89
nl94
nl98
nl02
nl03
nl06
nl10
nl12
no85
no89
no93
no97
no01
no05
no09
no13
pt91pt95pt99 pt02pt05
se85se88
se91
se94
se98
se02
se06
se10
ch71
ch75
ch79
ch83
ch87
ch91
ch95
ch99
ch03
ch07
−10 −5 0 5 10 15
Share of votes for ERW−parties
−5 −2.5 0 2.5 5
Share of immigrants
Coeff.(s.e.) = 1.64(0.26), R2=0.29
FIGURE 1. Immigration and far-right voting in the EU-15 countries, Norway, and Switzerland,
1970–2013. This scatter plot accounts for country fixed effects (i.e., both variables are centered
around the respective country-specific mean) and is based on 103 general election years in EU-15
countries, Norway, and Switzerland in the period between 1970 and 2013; only democratic periods
are used. Elections from countries, which do not have any far-right party throughout the whole
sample period are excluded. The inclusion of these 33 elections would give the following result:
coeff.(s.e.) D 0.53(0.14), R
2
D 0.09. Sixty-five elections could not be included due to missing
information on the number of residents without citizenship in the particular country years. Share of
immigrants is defined as the number of residents without citizenship relative to all residents. Data on
the total number of residents are from the database of Eurostat. Information on the number of residents
without citizenship is from various national sources; details are available upon request. Data on
election results are obtained from the Comparative Political Data Set I (23 OECD Countries) provided
by Klaus Armingeon, Sarah Engler, Panajotis Potolidis, Marl
´
ene Gerber, and Philipp Leimgruber
(see http://www.ipw.unibe.ch/research/datasets/index_eng.html). Information on founding years is
from Wikipedia.
immigrants study German). Although a heavy election defeat occurred for the FP
¨
O
due to internal conflicts in 2002, and while J
¨
org Haider died in a car accident in 2008,
the FP
¨
O again became a powerful political force in the 2013 elections with more than
20% of the votes. In the first round of the Presidential election in April 2016, the FP
¨
O
candidate received the relative majority, 35.1% of the votes; in the runoff in May, he
received 49.7%. However, the constitutional court annulled the result of that election
due to irregularities in the vote count in several communities. In the new runoff election
in December 2016, the FP
¨
O candidate received 46.2%.
To test whether Austrian voters are more or less likely to vote for the FP
¨
O
when there are more immigrants in their neighborhood, we use community-level
1344 Journal of the European Economic Association
data. Community characteristics are taken from population census data, covering the
universe of the Austrian population, thus minimizing measurement problems.
Although it is reasonable to think that more immigrants in one’s neighborhood
drive anti-immigration sentiments and support for a far-right party, the causality may,
in principle, go the other way as immigrants may avoid xenophobic neighborhoods. We
begin by establishing that there is no significant relationship between voting outcomes
in a community at the beginning of a decade and the ensuing decadal change in the
immigrant share. Although this does not eliminate concerns regarding reverse causality,
it makes it much less likely that immigrant residential sorting is driven by local
support for the FP
¨
O. Relatedly, we investigate whether initial immigrants’ location
choices may have been driven by local attitudes toward immigration. We calculate the
correlation between the immigrant share in 1971 and a proxy for long-standing anti-
immigrant sentiments, namely, the vote shares for the Deutsche Nationalsozialistische
Arbeiterpartei (DNSAP, the Austrian counterpart of the German NSDAP) from a 1930
election, the only Austrian election in which the Nazis participated. We do not find a
significant relationship, consistent with the idea that local attitudes toward immigration
are not prime determinants of immigrants’ location choices.
We then use two approaches to investigate the impact of immigration (in the
primary analysis: the share of residents without Austrian citizenship) on the FP
¨
O’s
vote share in a community. We use panel regressions with community fixed effects
to eliminate unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity and thus focus on the impact
of the change in immigration on the change in voting outcomes. We also provide
complementary evidence using instrumental variables regressions in changes, using
immigrants’ historical residential patterns as a source of exogenous variation.
Our baseline fixed effect estimate suggests that immigration has an economically
important and statistically significant effect on right-wing voting. A one percentage-
point increase in the immigrant percentage in a community increases the FP
¨
O vote
share in the community by about 0.16 percentage points. This implies that a one-
standard-deviation increase in the local share of immigrants is associated with a
0.11 standard-deviation increase in the FP
¨
O vote share. These results are obtained
controlling for a range of community factors, such as industry structure, labor market
conditions, and demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Interestingly for the
current policy debate, we do not identify an immigration level where the effect on FP
¨
O
votes levels off, nor do we find evidence of “tipping points”.
Investigating the channels behind the association of immigration and voting results,
we establish the following further results. We document that low- and medium-skilled
immigration causes Austrian voters to turn to the far right, whereas more high-skilled
immigration either has an insignificant or a negative effect on FP
¨
O votes. We also find
that the effects of immigration are stronger where unemployment among natives is
high; where labor market competition between natives and immigrants is strong; where
natives are highly educated; and where there are many immigrant children. Moreover,
we provide suggestive evidence that immigration may have negative consequences for
the quality of schooling and the availability of childcare. Taken together, the evidence
is consistent with the idea that natives worry both about detrimental labor market
Halla, Wagner, and Zweim
¨
uller Immigration and Voting for the Far Right 1345
outcomes and about negative externalities of immigration on compositional amenities,
and that these worries are important drivers of anti-immigrant sentiments and support
for the FP
¨
O.
Finally, we repeat the analysis with an instrumental variable (IV) approach. This is
an important complement to the fixed-effect approach because there may be unobserved
factors that attract immigrants but also boost FP
¨
O support. We rely on specific features
of the history of immigration into Austria and the resulting historical settlement
patterns. Historical immigrant settlement patterns have been used as the basis for IVs in
various labor economics settings (see, for instance, Altonji and Card 1991;Card2001;
Dustmann, Fabbri, and Preston 2005; Saiz 2007; Cortes 2008). In Section 5, we argue
that, in the present setting, this is a useful approach because, arguably, the allocation
of early immigrant cohorts was mainly driven by institutional idiosyncrasies. Drawing
on different inflows of immigrants into Austria at different points in time, we compute
changes in the “supply-push” component of immigration into communities from one
census year to the next.
The advantage of the IV approach is that it identifies a causal effect of immigration
on FP
¨
O votes by exploiting exogenous variation generated by historical immigrant
networks. One limitation of the IV approach is a weak first stage when the change in
immigration is measured as the percentage-point increase in the share of immigrants
in the community population. However, the IV works very well when the change
in immigration is measured in percent changes of the immigrant share (and when,
therefore, the dependent variable is the percent change of the FP
¨
O vote share). Although
the percent-change specification may lead to different quantitative predictions away
from the mean, we verify that this is not a major problem in the present application:
For the OLS fixed effects setting, we show that percentage-point and percent-change
specifications yield very similar predictions for a broad range of immigration levels
and FP
¨
O vote shares.
Overall, the results of the two empirical approaches, OLS fixed effects and IV,
yield similar inferences. In particular, depending on the specification, a one-standard-
deviation increase in the local share of immigrants is associated with a 0.08–0.14
standard-deviation increase in the FP
¨
O vote share. We also find quite similar results as
in the fixed effects OLS regressions in terms of the relevance of the labor market and
compositional amenities channels.
Three guideposts can be used to put this analysis into the context of the existing
literature.
First, our analysis is related to a rich literature studying political preferences and
attitudes toward immigration.
1
This literature is typically based on survey data, and
1. For studies on attitudes toward immigration see Card, Dustmann, and Preston (2012), Dustmann
and Preston (2004), Dustmann and Preston (2007), Facchini and Mayda (2009), Hainmueller and Hiscox
(2007), Hainmueller and Hiscox (2010), Krishnakumar and M
¨
uller (2012), O’Rourke and Sinnott (2006),
and Scheve and Slaughter (2001). For studies related to preferences for political parties and/or policies,
see Citrin, Green, Muste, and Wong (1997), Dahlberg, Edmark, and Lundqvist (2012), D
¨
ulmer and Klein
(2005), Knigge (1998), and Lubbers and Scheepers (2000).
