All We Need Is Contact Elsayed & Schuster All We Need Is Contact The Effect of Asylum Seekers on the Vote Share of the Far-Right in Germany Nourhan Elsayed, Roxanne Schuster Abstract: Anecdotal evidence suggests that the influx of asylum seekers and the rise of the far-right may be connected. In our paper, we use the 2017 Bundestag elections in Germany as a case study to answer the following questions: how does the proportion of asylum seekers on the local level affect the vote share of the far-right? do different legal categories of asylum seekers have different effects on the far-right vote share? does the frequency of contact (as measured by urbanity) between the natives and asylum seekers strengthen or weaken this effect? Our findings show that regardless of their legal category, asylum seekers decrease the far-right vote share. We also found evidence that this effect is stronger in rural districts than in urban districts. 1 Introduction During the last five years, Germany, like several other Western European countries, wit- nessed an unprecedented influx of asylum seekers, in a sequence of events that came to be popularly known as the “European refugee crisis” (Steinmayr 2016, p. 3). In 2015, for example, Germany received 441.800 first-time asylum-seeking applicants, a figure that constitutes 35% of all first-time applicants in the EU (Eurostat 2016). Of Germany’s applicants, those from Syria (41%) constituted the highest proportion (Eurostat 2016). Concurrent to the European refugee crisis, the far-right witnessed a large increase in its vote share in many Western European countries (Halla, Wagner & Zweimüller 2017, p. 1342), most prominently France (the Front National Party), the UK (the United King- dom Independence Party) and Italy (the Italian Lega Nord) (Barone, D’Ignazio, Blasio, & Naticchioni 2016, p. 1). Germany was no exception. In the 2017 Bundestag elections, the newly founded far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won a whooping 13.3% of the seats, making it the largest opposition party (Federal Returning Office, 2017). Its parliamentary representation marked the first time a far-right party has entered the Bun- destag since the Second World War (Schwartz 2016). All these far-right parties share one ideological feature: an anti-immigration program (Mudde 1996 in Halla, Wagner & Zweimüller 2017, p. 1342). Anecdotal evidence suggests that the influx of asylum seekers and the rise of the far-right may be connected (Harmon 2017). In our paper, we use the 2017 Bundestag elections in Germany as a case study to answer the following questions: how does the proportion of asylum seekers on the local level affect the vote share of the far-right? do different legal categories of asylum seekers have different effects on the far-right vote share? does the frequency of contact (as measured by urbanity) between the natives and asylum seekers strengthen or weaken this effect? 1