“Guest workers and native voting behaviour : a dutch case”

Abstract

With labour shortage problems on the political agenda, the recruitment of labour migrants is a lively political debate in the Netherlands at the moment. Leftists, rightists, liberals, and socialists, they all have different conceptions whether migrants are welcome, necessary, or unwanted. “The Netherlands needs labour migrants” - Klaas Dijkhoff (9 December, 2022). This quote comes from the former party chairman of the Dutch liberal party. In 2023, the question arose in Dutch politics as to whether guest workers are desirable to fill the gap caused by the labour shortage. Political parties are divided: the liberal party and the Christian Democrats only desire foreign guest workers, not economic refugees, while the labour party takes the view that the Netherlands should be an open country that facilitates the welcoming of foreigners. There are also anti-immigration parties who oppose all foreigners. This debate was also present in the 1960s, with the only difference being that the flow of refugees was considerably smaller, and only guest workers were a point of discussion. It is relevant to examine the effects of the 1960s on voting behaviour and the mechanisms through which migration influenced political preferences because this debate continues to persist. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of migration on the voting behaviour of natives. This thesis will research the Netherlands for several reasons. Firstly, this case is largely unexplored. Secondly, the availability of very detailed data encourages a deeper dive into the Netherlands specifically. Lastly, this case is interesting because some say this time period of investigation is the starting point of the multiculturalization of the Netherlands. In this thesis, I investigate the effect of the ratio of migrants in a municipality on the vote shares of the three major political parties in the 1960s. By employing instrumental variable regression, I address potential endogeneity problems. Furthermore, the novelty of this study lies in the carefully developed dataset, which includes socio-economic variables retrieved from census data and voting results of the Netherlands, all at the municipality level. The contribution of this thesis in the research area of political economics is three folded. Firstly, it adds an extensive dataset to the literature, which includes digitised census data, merged with election data, and migration statistics data. Secondly, it develops a new instrumental variable approach in the field of migration, which includes regional specialisation as a determinant. Thirdly, it sheds light on the Dutch political landscape, and shows how the Netherlands became a more diversified country. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: In section II, I present the literature review. In section III, I briefly discuss the political landscape in the 60s in the Netherlands. Furthermore, I will develop my hypothesis in section IV. In section V, I present the data and methodology, including the instrumental variable approach. In section VI, I present the empirical results, after which I will discuss the possible channels behind my findings in section VII, and in section VIII, I will conclude my study