The impact of syrian refugees on political preferences in turkey

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to find out the impact of Syrian refugees on political preferences in Turkey. A quasi-experimental empirical strategy is implemented—based on an instrumental variable design—by exploiting town-level variation (out of 970 towns/subprovinces) in refugee intensity and vote shares of political parties in the three consecutive parliamentary elections from November 2011 to November 2015 in this research, while the existing papers use only province-level data. As a result, 2.7 million (3.6 now) Syrian refugees in 2015 did not change the support for the ruling party, Justice and Development Party (JDP) and no evidence for labor market theory is observed. However, vote shifts between the two main opposition parties are observed, from the Republican People’s Party (RPP) to the Nationalist Movement Party (NMP). NMP increased its vote share while the vote share of RPP declined as a response to refugee influx into Turkey. This finding is consistent with the observation that nationalistic views could benefit from native voters’ worries/compositional concerns about the refugee influx, which supports cultural channel in the world literature through which immigration shows its impact on political preferences of natives. Moreover, cultural channel theory is also supported with the observation that Syrian refugee influx increased the support for People’s Democratic Party (PDP).