"Did Exposure to Asylum Seeking Migration Affect the Electoral Outcome of Alternative For Germany in Berlin? Evidence from the 2019 EU Elections." - to be published
Authors: A. Pettrachin, L. Gabrielli, J. Kim, S. Ludwig-Dehm, S. Pötzschke
This article analyses the impact of exposure to asylum-seeking migration during the European ‘refugee crisis’ on votes for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland at the 2019 European elections in Berlin. While other scholars investigated the relationship between locals’ exposure to asylum-seekers and far-right voting, we analyse this relationship at a very small scale (electoral district level), adopting an innovative methodological approach, based on geo-localization techniques and high-resolution spatial statistics. Furthermore, we assess the impact on this relationship of some previously neglected variables. Through spatial regression models, we show that exposure to asylum-seeking migration is negatively correlated with AfD vote shares, which provides support for so-called ‘contact theory’ and that the relationship is stronger in better-off districts. Remarkably, the relationship is weaker in districts containing bigger reception centres, which suggests that the effect of asylum-seeking migration depend on the perceived contact intensity (and, therefore, a moderating effect of reception centre size). Finally, the effects of districts’ socio-economic deprivation on the relationship between exposure to asylum-seeking migration and AfD vote shares is different in districts located in former East and West Berlin, which suggests an effect of socio-cultural history on the relationship between exposure to migration and far-right voting.
You can find a part of the data that we used here: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19983203.v1 and the full article (to be published soon) here: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2100543