The effect of far right parties on the location choice of immigrants: Evidence from Lega Nord Mayors

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bracco, Emanuele; De Paola, Maria; Green, Colin P.; Scoppa, Vincenzo
• 署名单位: University of Verona; Lancaster University; University of Calabria; IZA Institute Labor Economics; Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2018.07.012
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 12-26
• 关键词: immigration; Geographical Mobility; Voting behaviour; political economy; regression discontinuity design

摘要

Immigration has increasingly taken centre-stage in the political landscape. Part of this has been a rise in far-right, anti-immigration parties in a range of countries. Existing evidence suggests that the presence of immigrants generates an advantage for parties with anti-immigration or nationalist platforms. This paper explores a closely related but overlooked issue: how immigrant behaviour is influenced by these parties. We focus on immigrant location decisions in Northern Italy, an area that has seen the rise of the anti-immigration party Lega Nord. We construct a dataset of mayoral elections in Italy for the years 2002-2014 and estimate the effect of electing a mayor belonging to, or supported by, Lega Nord. Exploiting close elections in a regression discontinuity framework we demonstrate that the election of a Lega Nord mayor discourages immigrants from moving into the municipality. We also provide suggestive evidence that the effect is driven primarily by the anti-immigration politics of Lega Nord insofar as it is absent in the period before their adoption of an explicitly anti-immigration platform and is concentrated in smaller, less educated, municipalities. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.