Learning from the Origins

No 10626, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: How do political preferences and voting behaviors respond to information coming from abroad? Focusing on the international migration network, I document that opinion changes at the origins spill over to 1st- and 2nd-generation immigrants abroad. Local diasporas, social media, and family ties to the origins facilitate the transmission, while social integration at destination weakens it. Using the variation in the magnitude, timing, and type of origin-country exposure to the European Refugee Crisis of 2015, I show that salient events trigger learning from the origins. Welcoming asylum policies at the origins decrease opposition to non-Europeans and far-right voting abroad. Transitory refugee flows through the origins send abroad the backlash. Data from Google Trends and Facebook suggests elevated attention to events at the origins and communication with like-minded groups as mechanisms. Similar spillovers following the passage of same-sex marriage laws show the phenomenon generalizes beyond refugee attitudes.

Keywords: immigration; social networks; spillovers; political attitudes; integration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 F22 J61 O15 P00 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cdm, nep-his, nep-pol and nep-ure
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Working Paper: Learning from the Origins (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10626

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