Voter responses to refugee arrivals: Effects of settlement policy

In this paper we leverage a sudden shift in refugee settlement policy to study the electoral consequences of refugee settlements. After the 2013 Norwegian parliamentary election, the newly elected right-wing government made a concerted effort to spread newly arrived immigrants across the country, with the consequence that some municipalities with limited experience in settling refugees accepted to do so. We propose that such policy changes have political consequences, increasing the salience of immigration issues and shifting voters’ preferences to the right. We further propose that successful refugee integration can move (parts of) the electorate to the left, with stronger political polarization as a possible effect of the policy change. Applying difference-in-differences techniques, we find no evidence of unidirectional shifts in voter sentiments, but support for the hypothesis of stronger political polarization.     

Climate politics in hard times: How local economic shocks influence MPs attention to climate change

Most countries struggle to implement CO₂ reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade-off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade-offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference-in-differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade-offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a ‘window of opportunity’ for advocates of the ‘ green shift’.