How Exposure to Refugees Fueled Golden Dawn Support in Greece

Does exposure to the refugee crisis increase support for extreme-right parties? This study leverages a sudden refugee surge on Aegean islands to provide causal evidence that brief, visible inflows changed electoral outcomes before the September 2015 Greek election.

🧭 Natural experiment on Aegean islands

Some islands close to the Turkish border experienced sudden and drastic arrivals of Syrian refugees, while otherwise similar islands slightly farther away did not. These inflows were massive but transient, with refugees largely passing through in the weeks before the September 2015 election. The geographic variation in exposure functions as a natural experiment.

📊 How exposure and voting were compared

• Vote shares for exposed islands were compared to those for nonexposed islands with similar institutional and socioeconomic characteristics.
• Placebo tests show precrisis trends in vote shares for exposed and nonexposed islands were virtually identical, supporting the claim of unbiased causal estimates.
• Analysis focuses on vote share changes for Golden Dawn, described here as the most extreme-right party in Europe, around the September 2015 election.

🔍 Key finding

• Islands that faced a massive but transient inflow of refugees just before the election saw Golden Dawn’s vote share increase by 2 percentage points — a 44 percent increase at the average.

⚖️ Why this matters

Mere exposure to a visible refugee surge, even when temporary, was sufficient to elevate support for an extreme-right party. This result has important implications for theories of antirefugee backlash and for understanding how short-term demographic shocks can reshape local electoral dynamics.