The effect of immigration on the perception of political institutions

Details

Supervisors

Docquier, Frédéric

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences économiques, orientation générale

Abstract

First of all, the original main title of my thesis “the effect of immigration on political choice” changes to “the effect of immigration on the perception of political institutions”. Since, in the development of my thesis, I do not really measure the impact of immigration on voting outcomes or voting intentions. My analysis follows a similar procedure, but the orientation of my research is rather in the direction to measure the impact of immigrants on the perception of political institutions. My thesis provides evidences of the effect of immigration on the perception of political institutions at the national and European level. In my analysis, I make use of data at the regional level of the EU28 countries. On the one hand, by the OLS regression, I find significant, but biased, effects of immigration on the perception of political institutions. On the other hand, my robust fixed effects estimates indicate no significant effects for changes in immigration on the decline in the perception of political institutions, neither at the national nor at European level. However, the education of the immigrants matters. I detect a non-linearity of the results of low educated immigrants on the perception of political institutions at the national and European level. On the whole, my findings do not explicitly confirm that individual assessment of political institutions is influenced by the size of immigration.