South-South migration and elections: Evidence from post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Little is known about the political consequences of immigration in Sub-Saharan Africa. In thispaper, we estimate the effect of exposure to immigration on election outcomes in South Africa. Our analysis is based on municipality panel data and an instrumental variable (IV) strategy exploiting historical migrant settlement patterns. We find that local immigration concentration has a negativeimpact on the performance of the incumbent African National Congress, whereas support for the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, is found to increase in municipalities with a larger immigrant presence. These effects hold regardless of the skill levels of immigrants in a municipality.In terms of mechanisms, competition over jobs and local public services as well as ethnic diversityand cultural factors influence how immigration affects election outcomes. These findings are robustto a broad range of sensitivity checks. They provide evidence that immigration can be a politicallysalient issue in migrant-destination Sub-Saharan African countries. They also show that immigrationcan affect election results even in contexts where there is no single issue anti-migrant party.