Electoral Cycles of Refugee Acceptance: Evidence from 34 European Countries

• In Event: Poster Session: International Political Economy 1 & Migration and Citizenship
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Migration and Citizenship

Abstract

When do countries willingly accept asylum seekers as refugees? To answer this question, this paper highlights the national election cycle which is one of the crucial political institutions that fundamentally shape incentive structures of the governments. Although comparative political scientists have examined the dynamics of electoral cycles to explain numerous political and economic phenomena, such as political violence, fiscal and monetary policies, political trust, and the popular satisfaction with democracy, we still know little about how domestic electoral cycles impact international exchange of people such as migrants and refugees. Meanwhile, migration and IR scholars have identified various features that cause refugee flows, such as economic disparities, ethnic kinships, and security issues in their home countries. However, only a few studies have systematically explored the roles of domestic political institutions on how they transmit the natives’ preferences to the government decisions on refugee acceptance. Even among this emerging stream of studies, they stress relatively stable features, such as political regime types or partisanship. By instead focusing on a short-term feature, namely election cycles, we argue that political institutions could alter national preferences on refugee acceptance even when holding broader institutional characteristics constant.

When the government decides whether and to what extent they recognize displaced persons as refugees, they need to calculate the costs and benefits of accepting those people as the members of their country. On the cost side, their native citizens may dislike the acceptance of those displaced persons in their communities due to cultural and economic reasons, so that recognizing a large number of refugees may undermine he incumbents’ electoral support base. On the benefit side, accepting displaced persons as refugees enables the host countries to gain more diverse labor forces which may benefit their economies as well as is morally desirable from a humanitarian perspective as a member of the international society. Based on these rationalist assumptions, we theorize that both electoral incentives and the existing volumes of refugees influence the cost and benefit calculus of the host governments. When a host country already receives a large size of refugees, natives are likely to perceive the further inflow of refugees less threatening. In such a situation, the government would be less inclined to control refugee volumes prior to national elections. By contrast, when a recipient country has not received a large volume of refugees in its past, its natives are more likely to express exclusionary attitudes toward refugee inflow. Being afraid of electoral backlash, the government is then more likely to restrict the number of refugees on the eve of elections.

For empirical analysis, we newly complied monthly data set of refugee inflows and national elections in 34 European countries (2008-2023). Adopting a regression discontinuity design centered around election time, our preliminary analysis finds election cycles impact refugee acceptance but conditional upon existing size of refugees. When a country does not have an experience of accepting a large number of refugees, the government is more likely to stop accepting refugees prior to both presidential and parliamentary elections. In turn, they resume accepting a larger volume immediately after those elections. Conversely, when a country has already accepted a large number of refugees, elections do not restrict refugee volumes during election campaigning periods. These statistical results support our theoretical expectations.

Our research makes both practical and theoretical contributions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that systematically ties the impacts of election cycles to refugee acceptance. Therefore, it provides evidence for policy discussions on how politicians control refugees depending on their interests. Furthermore, the widely accepted practice in migration studies has been to rely on annual data. To better catch specific nuances of each election, our research departs from this trend and instead tackles the issue on a monthly basis. Indeed, refugee inflows hold dissimilar characteristics and consequences even within a year. Thus, this kind of more detailed investigations would shed light on new theoretical explanations and enrich our understanding on migration and refugees. Meanwhile, our analysis suggests a challenging dilemma: To prevent the governments’ decisions on refugees from being driven by domestic electoral incentives, the countries need to have already institutionalized the inflow of refugees. However, to institutionalize refugee inflow, the governments need to win electoral support from their natives in the first place to liberalize refugee policies. This research suggests a daunting hurdle that advanced democracies face when extending rights and protections to their outsiders.

Authors

• Yujin Woo, Hitotsubashi University

• Masaaki Higashijima, University of Tokyo

• Naoki Shimizu, University of Kochi