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AbstractIn 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.

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. ; publishedVersion ; © 2021 The Authors. European Journal of Political Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Consortium for Political Research This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

AbstractThis article explores the causal effect of personal contact with ethnic minorities on majority members' views on immigration, immigrants' work ethics, and support for lower social assistance benefits to immigrants than to natives. Exogenous variation in personal contact is obtained by randomising soldiers into different rooms during the basic training period for conscripts in the Norwegian Army's North Brigade. Based on contact theory of majority–minority relations, the study spells out why the army can be regarded as an ideal contextual setting for exposure to reduce negative views on minorities. The study finds a substantive effect of contact on views on immigrants' work ethics, but small and insignificant effects on support for welfare dualism, as well as on views on whether immigration makes Norway a better place in which to live.

Do terror attacks have an impact on public opinion, even if the terror attacks happen far away? We exploit the fact that the fourth round of the European Social Survey was conducted in several West European countries at the time of the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, India, in order to identify the causal effect of the Mumbai attacks on public opinion. We identify a clear jump in fear of terrorism at home as a consequence of the terror attacks, but despite the increase in fear of terrorism, we find no significant effect of the attack on support for illiberal interrogation techniques or for liberal immigration policies. We do find indications of a shift in conservative direction on the left-right scale, but this shift is not significant in all time windows. Our findings suggest that a terror attack needs to have a very large impact on the fear of terrorism before people change their policy preferences. Adapted from the source document.

SummaryThe existing literature on diversity and trust has focused on a unidimensional understanding of diversity. We argue that a unidimensional approach is theoretically and empirically problematic and use a recently developed multidimensional measure of social structure to investigate which aspects of diversity are associated with generalized trust. We run cross‐country regressions with up to 115 countries to explore the importance of fractionalization for average trust levels 1981–2008. Using several different measures of ethnic fractionalization, we do not find a general and robust relationship between ethnic fractionalization and trust. In line with expectations, however, we find a negative and significant association between ethnic fractionalization and trust for low levels of ethno‐religious cross‐cuttingness and cross‐fractionalization, illustrating the importance of multidimensionality.