Direct Democracy and Local Xenophobia: Behavioural Micro-Level Evidence from Naturalisation Decisions in Swiss Municipalities

We examine the potential discriminatory effects of direct democracy and the drivers of anti-immigrant sentiment using new micro-level evidence from naturalization decisions in Swiss municipalities. Naturalization applications in Switzerland are largely decided at the municipal level involving a whole spectrum of different voting arrangements from pure direct democracy (secret ballot referenda) to executive delegation (appointed citizenship commissions). Our multi-layered dataset collects the voting records on individual applicants and combines it with detailed information about the applicants and municipalities across a large set of municipalities for the years between 1990 and 2010. The data comprises citizenship decisions over thousands of applicants with radically different backgrounds and attributes under various institutional arrangements. Using a variety of cross-applicant and cross-municipality comparisons, this empirical strategy allows us to address questions pertaining to the drivers of local xenophobia and the discriminatory effects of different voting mechanisms.