Do Immigrants Move to Welfare? Subnational Evidence from Switzerland

The welfare magnet hypothesis holds that immigrants are likely to relocate to regions with generous welfare benefits. Although this assumption has motivated extensive reforms to immigration policy and social programs, the empirical evidence remains contested. In this study, we assess detailed administrative records from Switzerland covering the full population of social assistance recipients between 2005 and 2015. By leveraging local variations in cash transfers and exogenous shocks to benefit levels, we identify how benefits shape intracountry residential decisions. We find limited evidence that immigrants systematically move to localities with higher benefits. The lack of significant welfare migration within a context characterized by high variance in benefits and low barriers to movement suggests that the prevalence of this phenomenon may be overstated. These findings have important implications in the European setting where subnational governments often possess discretion over welfare and parties frequently mobilize voters around the issue of “benefit tourism.”

Institutional Foundations for Cyber Security: Current Responses and New Challenges

Almost everyone recognizes the salience of cyberspace as a fact of daily life. Given its ubiquity, scale, and scope, cyberspace has become a fundamental feature of the world we live in and has created a new reality for almost everyone in the developed world and increasingly for people in the developing world. This paper seeks to provide an initial baseline, for representing and tracking institutional responses to a rapidly changing international landscape, real as well as virtual. We shall argue that the current institutional landscape managing security issues in the cyber domain has developed in major ways, but that it is still “under construction.” We also expect institutions for cyber security to support and reinforce the contributions of information technology to the development process. We begin with (a) highlights of international institutional theory and an empirical “census” of the institutions-in-place for cyber security, and then turn to (b) key imperatives of information technology-development linkages and the various cyber processes that enhance developmental processes, (c) major institutional responses to cyber threats and cyber crime as well as select international and national policy postures so critical for industrial countries and increasingly for developing states as well, and (d) the salience of new mechanisms designed specifically in response to cyber threats

How crises shape circles of solidarity : evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

Published online: 26 May 2023How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected boundaries of solidarity? Human-induced crises that impose asymmetric costs tend to sharpen pre-existing divides, but natural disasters often strengthen solidarity. The pandemic possesses properties of both kinds of crisis. In a panel survey conducted in Northern Italy, the initial epicenter of the pandemic, we asked respondents to complete conjoint tasks querying who was likely to violate health guidelines (wave 1) and who should be prioritized for vaccine distribution (wave 2). We find that while discrimination towards the rich is nearly universal, bias against other outgroups depends on ideology and personal experience with the crisis. Leftwing individuals display discrimination towards partisan outgroups, while those on the right display ethnic bias. However, this effect is conditional: those who suffered a significant income loss but no health effects display heightened discrimination, while respondents who experienced COVID-19 as a personal health crisis are less likely to penalize outgroups

How Crises Shape Circles of Solidarity: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected boundaries of solidarity? Human-induced crises that impose asymmetric costs tend to sharpen pre-existing divides, but natural disasters often strengthen solidarity. The pandemic possesses properties of both kinds of crisis. In a panel survey conducted in Northern Italy, the initial epicenter of the pandemic, we asked respondents to complete conjoint tasks querying who was likely to violate health guidelines (wave 1) and who should be prioritized for vaccine distribution (wave 2). We find that while discrimination towards the rich is nearly universal, bias against other outgroups depends on ideology and personal experience with the crisis. Leftwing individuals display discrimination towards partisan outgroups, while those on the right display ethnic bias. However, this effect is conditional: those who suffered a significant income loss but no health effects display heightened discrimination, while respondents who experienced COVID-19 as a personal health crisis are less likely to penalize outgroups

The politics of proximity : local redistribution in developed democracies

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2015.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-210).Over the last few decades, countries across the European Economic Area (EEA) have granted local governments considerable discretion over social policy. This project examines the consequences of these reforms. Drawing on unique data from over 28,000 European local governments, it demonstrates that decentralization has not been accompanied by declining levels of provision, as predicted by extant theories, but rather by significant expansion in the scale and scope of redistributive activity. Explaining this puzzle, the dissertation argues that local government behavior is shaped by the 'politics of proximity', which provides clear incentives for incumbents to invest in redistributive policy for electoral gain. These hypotheses are tested across five empirical chapters, each of which leverages micro-level data, natural experiments, and speech evidence to explore this emerging form of redistributive politics.by Jeremy Ferwerda.Ph. D

Replication Data for: Immigration, Voting Rights, and Redistribution : Evidence from Local Governments in Europe

Replication files and online appendi

Shielding Voters? How Partisanship Shapes the Placement of Refugee Housing Facilities

Europe has experienced a sharp increase in humanitarian arrivals. In response, many countries have adopted dispersal policies to proportionally allocate asylum seekers across national territory. Examining a prominent case --- the Syrian refugee protection crisis in Germany --- this paper demonstrates that ostensibly bureaucratic dispersal policies may nevertheless be structured by local political competition. Specifically, we find that the county governments tasked with implementing the dispersal policy systematically select municipalities dominated by electoral opponents to host group accommodation facilities. Although the policy was designed to distribute asylum seekers according to population and tax revenue, the center-right's control over the majority of county councils resulted in a concentration of refugee housing within left-leaning municipalities. Our findings, which suggest that refugee exposure can be endogenous to local politics, provide a potential explanation for why refugee inflows have been found to have a negligible impact on the electoral performance of incumbents in many receiving states