Research

Job market paper

The Political Consequences of Immigration: Evidence from Refugee Shocks in Denmark

How does immigration affect politics? Because political change happens on many margins, answering this requires looking not only across, but also within parties. In this article, I utilize the quasi-random allocation of refugees to Danish municipalities and subsequent settlement patterns to study how an inflow of refugees affects local politics across and within parties. Drawing on an administrative dataset consisting of the full population of political candidates for Danish municipal councils from 1993-2013, I show that exogenous changes in the share of refugees does not change vote shares for far right nor established parties in this setting. Refugee migration instead causes more candidates from low socioeconomic status (SES) to enter and be elected into politics. This is driven both by parties and voters. First, established parties place low SES candidates highly on lists and switch to a party system where individual candidate popularity rather than party list position determines election. Second, voters cast individual votes for these low SES candidates. In an experiment I show that voters' preference for low SES candidates can in part be explained by their increased preferences for redistribution towards economically vulnerable natives, which mirrors the preferences of low SES candidates. The findings in this paper suggest that parties may be able to compete with the far right by including and promoting socioeconomically representative candidates and increasing voter influence over candidate selection.

Selected Work in Progress

• More COPS, More Fatalities? (with Rebecca Goldstein and Deepak Premkumar)

• Does Education Shape Pro-Social Behavior? Evidence from Tax Records on Charitable Giving

• Selection into the Public Sector: Evidence from CV Data