Explaining the rising support for right-wing populist parties in Europe during the last decade is an issue that interests both economists, sociologists and political scientists. A number of theories suggest that the rising inflow of migrants to Europe has had an important causal effect on right-wing populist support. However, as migration patterns generally are not exogenous to right-wing populist support, it is difficult to interpret the estimates of a correlation study causally. In this paper, I exploit a Swedish refugee dispersal program as a natural experiment to estimate the effect of refugee inflow on the support for the right-wing populist party the Sweden Democrats using an instrumental variable strategy. Despite detailed institutional knowledge, I am not able to find support for any short-term effects of refugee inflow on the self-reported preferences for the Sweden Democrats. This goes against the findings of most previous studies. However, the multicollinearity of some of my covariates are high. In addition, as the program was introduced in 2016, there are few years available for identification. Thus, the precision of the estimates is relatively low and the study would benefit from adding more years to the panel data set.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-388529 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Barmen, Viggo |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Nationalekonomiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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