Abstract:
What role do material concerns play in activating support for anti-immigrant parties? Previous research has hypothesized the existence of a welfare state channel, in which citizens exposed to a decline in the net value of per capita transfers will be more supportive of anti-immigrant policies. Yet, evidence that the welfare state channel contributes to the rise of the Far Right at the national level is mixed. This paper focuses on social programs that provide geographically constrained in-kind goods as especially prone to creating distributional conflict between immigrants and natives. We leverage exogenous variation in the intensity of this conflict to identify its effect on electoral outcomes. We focus on Austria’s affordable housing program, which benefits a quarter of households. In 2006, a EU directive forced municipalities to open public housing to previously excluded immigrants. As we demonstrate, this reform sharply increased support for anti-immigrant parties in affected municipalities. More broadly, our findings suggest that populist parties may have benefited from the recent confluence of austerity measures and concerns surrounding the congestion of in-kind social benefits.
