Department of Economics

The decision by Germany to lead the effort against the refugee crisis in 2015 sparked controversy amongmany of its native population. With over a million new refugees in 2015 and 2016 alone fleeing war andterorrism from mainly Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, member’s of Germany’s far-right were outraged bythe decision. The AfD used the controversy to create a platform and gain popularity. They eventuallygained the third most votes in the 2017 federal election, the first time in 60 years that an openlynationalistic party would enter parliament. In this paper, we analyze how an increasing number ofrefugees affects voting sentiment in Germany. We search for causal effects of refugee numbers on votingfor far-right political parties. We perform our analysis with multiple regression models, mainly relying onfixed effects to determine causality. Although our initial hypothesis was that there should be a positiverelationship between the refugee share and voting for far-right political parties, our results indicate theopposite. We found that an increase in the amount of refugees actually decreases the average vote sharefor anti-refugee political parties. This falls in line with contact theory, the idea being that exposurebetween natives and foreigners can help create tolerance and acceptance among both groups. Our analysiscould be improved more, as many of our results show to be insignificant. If we took a more granularapproach by analyzing county-level data, we may be able to better isolate the effect that an increase in therefugee share has on voting.