Immigration and Support for the Welfare State: Local and Institutional Responses

• Cools, Sara; Finseraas, Henning & Røgeberg, Ole (2021). Local Immigration and Support for Anti-Immigration Parties: A Meta-Analysis. American Journal of Political Science (AJPS). 65(4), p. 988–1006. doi: 10.1111/ajps.12613. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Does the share of immigrants in a community influence whether people vote for anti-immigration parties? We conduct a systematic review of the causal inference literature studying this question. We collect estimates from 20 studies and develop a new Bayesian meta-analysis framework to account for both between-study heterogeneity in effect sizes and the possibility of reporting bias. Although meta-analysis methods that do not adjust for reporting bias suggest a moderate effect of local immigration, our Bayesian model finds that the effect of local immigration on far-right voting is on average negligible once we account for reporting bias. However, the analysis also reveals a large heterogeneity in effects across contexts, suggesting that local immigration may be important for anti-immigration vote shares in certain settings.

• Finseraas, Henning & Strøm, Marte (2021). Voter responses to refugee arrivals: Effects of settlement policy. European Journal of Political Research. doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12461. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this paper we leverage a sudden shift in refugee settlement policy to study the electoral consequences of refugee settlements. After the 2013 Norwegian parliamentary election, the newly elected right-wing government made a concerted effort to spread newly arrived immigrants across the country, with the consequence that some municipalities with limited experience in settling refugees accepted to do so. We propose that such policy changes have political consequences, increasing the salience of immigration issues and shifting voters’ preferences to the right. We further propose that successful refugee integration can move (parts of) the electorate to the left,with stronger political polarization as a possible effect of the policy change. Applying difference-in-differences techniques, we find no evidence of unidirectional shifts in voter sentiments, but support for the hypothesis of stronger political polarization.

• Cools, Sara; Finseraas, Henning & Rasmussen, Magnus Bergli (2020). The Immigrant-Native Gap in Union Membership: A Question of Time, Sorting, or Culture? Labour. doi: 10.1111/labr.12186. Full text in Research Archive
• Bratsberg, Bernt; Ferwerda, Jeremy; Finseraas, Henning & Kotsadam, Andreas (2020). How Settlement Locations and Local Networks Influence Immigrant Political Integration. American Journal of Political Science (AJPS). doi: 10.1111/ajps.12532. Full text in Research Archive
• Finseraas, Henning; Røed, Marianne & Schøne, Pål (2019). Labour immigration and union strength. European Union Politics. 21(1), p. 3–23. doi: 10.1177/1465116519881194. Full text in Research Archive
• Finseraas, Henning; Skorge, Øyvind Søraas & Strøm, Marte (2018). Does education affect immigration attitudes? Evidence from an education reform. Electoral Studies: an international journal on voting and electoral systems and strategy. 55(Oct), p. 131–135. doi: 10.1016/j.electstud.2018.06.009. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Empirical research consistently finds that people with high education have more liberal immigration attitudes. To what extent this relationship reflects a causal effect of education is, however, largely unknown. We rely on the staggered introduction of a major Norwegian education reform to get exogenous variation in respondents’ level of education. The reform lifted the bottom of the education distribution by increasing the compulsory years of education by two years. We find no significant differences in immigration attitudes between those who were educated in the old and the new education system. Our results suggest that if education has a causal effect on immigration attitudes, it is likely to operate on other education margins.

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