YSI-EHES Economic History Graduate Webinar: Anil Menon

Anil Menon, doctoral candidate from the University of Michigan will present his paper: Refugees and the Radical Right: Evidence from Post-WWII Forced Migrations

Registration form to attend the webinar: here.

Abstract: Do refugees reshape long-term political behavior in receiving areas? To investigate this question, I examine how the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to Germany at the end of WWII, one of the largest forced migrations in modern history, shaped electoral preferences over time. Expellee experiences surrounding forced migration helped foster a strong group identity. I argue that this shared identity and associated political demands motivated expellees to support the radical right. Using district-level data from 32 elections over 100 years, I find that communities which received greater shares of expellees remain more supportive of
the radical right in the short, medium, and long term. This relationship particularly manifests when identity-based grievances are unresolved and politically salient. Mechanism evidence, including novel data on expellee monuments and associations, suggests that a durable expellee identity helps account for these findings. These findings reveal an enduring behavioral legacy resulting from forced migration.