Is there a policy backlash to non-white refugees? Differential reactions to the 2015 European refugee “crisis” and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine underscore the unequal treatment experienced by forcibly displaced persons. While states have long resisted taking in refugees that they perceive to be racially undesirable, they often make exceptions for those deemed more desirable. Case-specific evidence suggests that states respond to the former by enacting restrictive policies and to the latter by creating new pathways for temporary and permanent immigration. However, no systematic tests exist of this proposition. I pair a regression discontinuity analysis of two population-based surveys with a time-series cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between large refugee inflows and migration policy changes from 1968 to 2013, finding support for my argument. Exposure to non-white refugees leads states to enact more restrictive policies and triggers public support for those restrictions. Exposure to white refugees produces the opposite result. These findings corroborate a growing literature on racial inequality in international politics.

Why do some refugee “crises'' elicit generosity while others provoke restriction? In 2015, European states responded to Syrian refugees with sharp restrictions, yet during the 2022 Ukrainian crisis, amid economic strain, the same governments adopted more open policies. I develop a formal model in which governments weigh scarcity costs, the racial identity of refugees, and geopolitical salience. The model predicts that economic scarcity magnifies backlash against non-white inflows but can weaken or even reverse restrictiveness toward white inflows when crises are geopolitically salient. I test these propositions using a country–year panel of asylum policy restrictiveness. Economic scarcity heightens the policy backlash to non-white arrivals. By contrast, scarcity reduces restrictiveness for white arrivals when geopolitical risk is high. These findings show how race, political economy, and geopolitics shape the politics of protection.

This paper looks at the impact of legacies of previous periods of violent authoritarian rule on post-unification, anti-foreigner violence in Germany. Extant work reveals the distribution of violent incidents is more concentrated in the new Bundesländer, which joined the Federal Republic in October 1990. Can differences in regime histories explain these disparate patterns of anti-foreigner violence in contemporary Germany? We address this question using novel data on anti-foreigner violence. While controlling for the usual correlates of anti-foreigner behavior (contact, economic performance) we specifically explore whether the distinct Bundesländer regime histories have an impact on post-unification levels of anti-foreigner violence. First, we consider whether different approaches to coming to terms with past in the FRG and the DDR can explain different patterns of anti-foreigner violence. Whereas the FRG went through a wrenching process of coming to terms with the past, which produced a widespread “culture of contrition,” the regime in the East swept the Nazi past under the rug, claiming that the SED represented the anti-Nazi current in German political culture. Second, we consider whether support for the Nazi party, as a measure of local historical xenophobia, in the late Weimar period translates into anti-foreigner violence in the post-unification era. The areas of interwar Germany which became the DDR, exhibited patterns of strong Red vs. Brown polarization in the Weimar area, whereas voting patterns in Western Germany were less polarized with higher levels of support for the moderate parties of the center-left and center-right.

Anti-immigrant prejudice persists throughout the world. Many scholars assert that this prejudice is higher among those who strongly identify with their nation. We complicate this conventional theory, asking whether national identity can be activated to reduce xenophobia. Specifically, we investigate whether connecting immigration with an institution closely tied to national identity can reduce anti-immigrant sentiment among strong national identifiers. Using evidence from two survey experiments of United Kingdom citizens, we show that priming immigration within the National Health Service reduces support for anti-immigrant policies and anti-immigrant sentiment. Importantly, this effect is larger for the strongest national identifiers and persists regardless of whether immigrants are framed as high- or low-skill workers. Further this relationship is unique to the NHS as opposed to private healthcare markets. These results have significant implications for the value of highlighting the importance of immigration as a means to mollify anti-immigrant prejudice in the Global North.

For decades, many scholars and policymakers have presumed that immigration diminishes social capital by eroding social solidarity and weakening community ties, particularly when immigrants come from culturally different backgrounds. Such concerns have led to calls for limiting immigration despite the economic arguments that highlight the contribution of immigrants to economic development and other outcomes. However, extant work that implicates a negative relationship between immigration and social capital tends to either make this claim by fiat or use a limited selection of case studies. In this project, I use county-level and survey data from the United States, as well as a novel instrumental variable design, to examine this relationship. The findings challenge the prevailing assumptions about immigration’s negative effect on social capital. I find that immigration bolsters social capital, rather than diminishes it, which calls into question existing social fears that immigrants will cause society’s social ties to fray. This study offers important insights for policymakers and scholars interested in the political, social, and economic consequences of immigration.

Between 2019 and 2021, over a hundred Polish subnational governments–regional, district, and municipal–established so-called “LGBT Free Zones.” The zones, while largely symbolic, constituted official government policies that openly discriminated against LGBTQ+ individuals, fostering a general climate of hostility. At the same time, these zones garnered significant international backlash, including sanctions from the EU targeted at the implementing governments. These policies were largely pushed by the then-ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), and its allies as part of a broader electoral and political strategy. This paper analyzes the impact of these policies on PiS’ local election outcomes to examine the efficacy of this partisan strategy. We will analyze the results of the upcoming spring 2024 municipal elections, which will include 2,477 Polish local governments. These elections, the first since the zones’ implementation, present a unique opportunity to explore critical questions in democratic studies: the interplay between minority rights and electoral competition; the role of local governments in either challenging or reinforcing democratic backsliding; and the effectiveness of international interventions in protecting minority rights from local-level threats.

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is a prominent force in German politics, risking social solidarity, increasing anti-democratic attitudes, and advancing exclusionary policies. The AfD’s ascent in national polling underscores a striking paradox: the party’s popularity persists alongside its growing recognition as an extremist organization. Is extremism attracting voters, or rendering the far-right anathema to the mainstream electorate? This article addresses this question, examining the proximity of the AfD to right-wing extremist civil society and its impact on the party’s electoral performance. Using a novel dataset of AfD and extremist organization protests, we show that AfD participation in protests alongside extremist actors significantly increases its vote share between the 2013 and the 2017 elections. However, between 2017 and 2021, cooperation with right-wing extremist groups declined, and so did the contribution of that collaboration to the overall vote share. The findings contribute to the ongoing debate in political science about the impact of extremism on far-right parties.