Far-Right Mass Protests and Their Effects on Internal Migration

We study how far-right mass rallies affect people’s views about a city and thus location choices of nationals. To this end, we first exploit that the city of Dresden (Germany) unexpectedly experienced such rallies at the turn of the year 2014/15. Results from dyadic difference-in-differences and Synthetic Control analyses suggest that the number of (young) German adults who moved from another region to Dresden declined by around 10% due to the far-right mass protests. We complement our first analysis with a conjoint experiment where participants decide between two hypothetical cities. This experiment confirms that far-right rallies have a dissuasive effect and shows that left-wing people react stronger than right-wing people. It also reveals that far-right protests cause security concerns and concerns about finding like-minded people. The latter reaction is only observed for people that do not support the far right.

Brox, Enzo und Tommy Krieger (2025), Far-Right Mass Protests and Their Effects on Internal Migration, ZEW Discussion Paper Nr. 25-045, Mannheim.