Refugee-Hosting and Electoral Response: Challenging the Generalizability of the Backlash Hypothesis
In higher-income democracies, increased refugee presence often triggers electoral backlash, but little is known about its political effects in low-income countries where most refugees reside. Theoretically, we discuss why findings from wealthy countries may not generalize and offer an alternative framework rooted in developing countries' contexts. We test our framework in Uganda, the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa. Combining data on refugee settlements with election returns (2001-2021), we show that a substantial increase in refugee presence post-2014 did not result in a backlash against the incumbent government. Turning to elite rhetoric in parliament and partisan media, we find that as the salience of refugees increased, the incumbent party's tone became more positive, increasingly framing refugees in humanitarian and development terms. Thus, while, like other studies, we note the importance of elite rhetoric in migration politics, we highlight a case in which the incumbent's positive framing can help counter possible backlash.
Professor Guy Grossman is the David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations at the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is in applied political economy, with a substantive focus on governance, migration and forced displacement, human trafficking, and conflict processes, (mostly) in the context of developing countries.
He is the founder and co-director of Penn’s Development Research Initiative (PDRI-DevLab). Launched in 2020, PDRI-DevLab brings together faculty and graduate students from across Penn whose research seeks to identify solutions to the challenges facing low- and middle-income countries. PDRI seeks to foster impactful international development research by harnessing the expertise of its affiliates from various disciplines and utilizing diverse methodological approaches.
At Penn, he is also a Faculty Affiliate at The Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration Study (CSERI), a member of Wharton’s Lauder Graduate Group in International Studies, and an advisory board member of the Penn Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics. More broadly, he is a member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network, a Faculty Affiliate of Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab (IPL), and a Faculty Associate at Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC).
His work has appeared in Science magazine, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, and the Journal of Politics, among other journals. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University (2011, with distinction) as well as MA in Political Philosophy (2004, Summa cum laude) and LLB in Law (1999, Magna cum laude) both from Tel-Aviv University.