Does Exposure to Refugees Impact Political Support for Right‐Wing Parties? Empirical Evidence From Venezuelan Refugees in Brazil

ABSTRACT In this paper, we study the extent to which exposure to Venezuelan refugees in Brazil affected the support for right‐wing candidates in the 2018 elections in Brazil. We take advantage of the granular data provided by the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court to build a novel data set containing the distance from each polling station in the city of Boa Vista in the State of Roraima, which received the largest number of Venezuelan refugees in Brazil, to its closest refugee shelter. We find that polling stations that are closer to these shelters showed larger support for right‐wing candidates. Our results are robust to a placebo test, in which we look at the three (2006, 2010, 2014) elections, before the refugee crisis, to establish that distance to the closest shelter is not a pretreatment variable that explains political ideology.