Far-right parties and Acculturative Stress among Refugees

The presence of immigrant minorities has largely been seen as the driver of the far-right’s electoral success in Europe. These parties usually base their electoral campaigns on strong anti-immigrant rhetoric and advocate policies that adversely affect immigrants. Yet surprisingly, there is little scholarly work that has analysed the impact of the electoral success of these parties on the immigrant minorities living in Europe. This paper makes a novel contribution to the literature on the far-right and immigrant integration by linking the scholarship on acculturative stress among refugees to the relatively underdeveloped topic of the impact of far-right on immigrants themselves. Specifically, I theorize about and empirically examine the relationship between the vote share of far-right parties in German municipalities and the acculturative stress of refugees living there. Theoretically, studies have found an association between the rise of far-right parties and increased anti-immigrant sentiments in society. I argue that an increase in anti-immigrant sentiments should increase the everyday discrimination experienced by the refugees, thereby creating a sense of victimisation and stigma. I posit that these experiences adversely affect the acculturation process and their mental health, leading to higher acculturative stress. Empirically, I exploit the exogenous variation created by the random placement of refugees in German municipalities during the 2015 refugee crisis. The refugees were placed in the municipalities based on the prior population shares of municipalities and were not allowed to move until their applications were accepted. This creates the possibility to analyse the causal impact of far-right discourse on refugees’ experiences. The empirical analysis will use the IAB-BAMF-SOEP panel surveys and combine them with the vote share of the far-right party AFD at the municipal level. I will use multilevel regression models to test the hypothesis.