Essays on Democratic Resilience in an Era of Demographic Change

Chapter 1: Does immigration increase far-right support? The migration literature has debated this question for decades, with little consensus on whether local exposure to migrants fuels anti-immigrant voting or through which mechanisms. Most existing evidence comes from Western Europe and the United States, while far less is known about how migration shapes electoral outcomes in Global South democracies, which host the majority of the world's migrants and have increasingly experienced far-right mobilisation. This paper revisits the debate using recent Venezuelan and Haitian migration waves to Chile, a setting in which major migrant groups differ markedly in cultural proximity, skill composition, language, and social visibility, offering leverage on the electoral consequences of different migration profiles within a single national context. Using administrative migration records and a shift-share instrumental variables strategy, I estimate the causal effect of local migrant exposure on electoral outcomes in the 2017 and 2021 presidential elections. The results do not support the view that migration drives far-right voting. In local labour markets, increases in migrant shares reduce support for the far-right and increase support for the centre-right; at the municipal level, migration does not expand far-right support and mainstream parties continue to benefit. Culturally distant Haitian inflows do not generate a cultural-threat backlash and are consistently associated with lower far-right support across specifications. Overall, the findings indicate that exposure to migration reshapes competition within the right rather than fuelling far-right mobilisation. Chapter 2: Many democracies elect political leaders who are older than the public. Drawing on original surveys from Italy, South Korea, and the United States, we find evidence that these age gaps can weaken confidence in representation and reduce support for democracy. Further analysis of cross-national surveys from dozens of democracies reinforces these findings. However, in a conjoint experiment, we also show that age gaps weaken evaluations of representational quality less so than gender gaps. Results are similar across age cohorts, suggesting that age gaps constitute a general challenge to democratic support rather than fueling intergenerational conflict over democracy. These findings imply that democracies can modestly improve public satisfaction by increasing representation of younger generations. Chapter 3: Do far-right electoral victories increase hate crimes? We examine this question in U.S. House of Representatives elections from 2006 to 2022, using a sharp regression discontinuity design around close races involving far-right candidates. We argue that legislative victories can increase hate crimes through two symbolic and communicative channels: the visibility of exclusionary rhetoric and the institutional legitimation of exclusionary views. Unlike studies of executive officeholders, our setting isolates the consequences of electoral victory in a context where winners have limited local policy authority. The results show a selective rather than general effect. Hate crimes against LGBTQ+ individuals increase consistently and substantially after far-right victories, especially during and after the election of Donald Trump. At the same time, we do not find a robust aggregate increase across all minority groups. Exploratory evidence from media data and surveys is consistent with the proposed visibility and legitimation channels, but not with rapid broad changes in attitudes toward minorities. Far-right electoral success can therefore reshape the local conditions under which minority groups exercise their rights, even in the absence of formal policy change.