Sympathy for the Devil? Right-wing terrorism and political behavior in Hungary
P12-4
Presented by: Marton Vegh
Despite the growing right-wing terrorist threat in Europe, the effects of extreme-right violence on political behavior remain understudied. Especially little is known about the impact of right-wing extremist violence against minorities on the electoral performance of mostly non-violent radical right parties. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the electoral effect of the 2008-2009 terrorist attacks against Roma minority members in Hungary, the most significant case of domestic ethnic violence since WWII. The attacks preceded the radical right Jobbik's rise national prominence in the European and national parliamentary elections of 2009 and 2010, where it ran on an explicitly anti-Roma platform. To estimate the effect of exposure to terrorism – proxied as a binary measure of geographic proximity – on Jobbik's vote share at the precinct level, I utilize the spatial variation in targeted localities. To identify causal effects, I make use of a natural experiment in which the control group contains localities where perpetrators planned further attacks prior to their arrest. Difference-in-differences regression models with varying specifications demonstrate that the attacks' effect on Jobbik’s support and turnout was small, mostly negative and insignificant statistically. The results contradict most existing research which showed that terrorism is associated with profound changes in electoral behavior but failed to consider that electoral outcomes are endogenous to terrorists' target selection criteria.