In 2015, over 1 million asylum seekers came to Germany, the single largest intake by any European country since World War II. Germany proved an attractive destination because of its robust labor market, but also because of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s unilateral suspension of European Union rules that require states to send refugees back to their country of entry (Dublin Convention). This open door was initially supported by an explicit welcome culture (“We can do it”). At the same time, there were signs of increasing xenophobia, such as the rallies of PEGIDA and the popularity and electoral success of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD). In addition, violence against refugees and Muslims in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis increased sharply.
In the study Local Government Efficiency and Anti-Immigrant Violence, forthcoming in The Journal of Politics, my co-author Sara Wallace Goodman and I were interested in why anti-immigrant attacks occur with significant local or regional clustering. Specifically, we looked at the extent to which local government efficiency influences violence against immigrants.
Our argument states that efficient administrations, on the one hand, are better able to cope with the integration of immigrants and, on the other hand, mitigate political deprivation of citizens. Political deprivation refers to the perception that people have no influence on politics and that politicians and public officials are not sufficiently responsive to citizens’ concerns and needs—motives that were quite salient during the refugee crisis and might be related to frustration, negative sentiments toward outgroups, and even violence as shown in previous research.
For the empirical analyses, we used data on local violent attacks on refugees in Germany in 2015. Local government efficiency was measured using a novel indicator that relates expenditures of municipalities with service provision, such as accessibility of public transport, schools, and family physicians. Our results show a robust negative link between local government efficiency and violence. In other words: We find less anti-immigrant violence in municipalities with high local administrations operate efficiently in terms of service provision.
Interestingly, our developed efficiency measure corresponds substantially to the degree to which residents perceive their local governments as being efficient, which we determined by relating the indicator scores to aggregated survey responses from a 2016 survey conducted in German municipalities. Another feature is that our indicator works differently from municipalities mere capacity to spend, or the overall wealth of a community. Instead, it is rather important to look at the relation of spending and output in order to meaningfully capture how well local government function.
As a main take-away message of our study, we find that by improving the efficiency of the public services local governments provide, they not only improve the quality of cities and communities (and thus the satisfaction of their residents), but also the native-immigrant relations.
By Dr Conrad Ziller
Reference:
Ziller, Conrad and Goodman, Sara Wallace. 2019. Local Government Efficiency and Anti-Immigrant Violence (January 26, 2019). The Journal of Politics, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2992545
Dr Conrad Ziller is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology at the University of Cologne. His research focuses on the role of immigration in politics and society, immigrant integration, and policy effects on citizens.
