Public Fear of ‘the Others’ and Decision-Venue. How to Decide Refugee Settlement in Norwegian Cities – Local Referendum, the City Council or the State?

The Norwegian central authority requests every year the local governments to settle a certain number of refugees. However, the requests often raise local controversies about economic and cultural capacities, and instigate fear and resentment among the population. The settlement issue also has invigorated debates on what is a legitimate decision-making procedure – i.e. how to decide how many should have access. The paper investigate the public opinion on this issue in four cities and asks: 1) what is the local opinion on how to decide the settlement of refugees – the state, the municipal council or a local referendum? 2) and what drives public attitudes on this issue – e.g. risk perception (fear of the others), party preferences (ideology) or personal resources (education)? Political representatives in the local Council and especially central regulation tend to encapsulate the issue to responsible party politics, while referendum makes it open for populist entrepreneurship. I find that fearing the consequences of refugee settlement is widespread across all segments of the populace. Interestingly, scoring high on a fear-index (crime, culture, public services, jobs) have a substantial effect on the referendum option also among the voters on the left side of the political spectrum and the well-educated. In this group of anxious and resourceful citizens, preferences for local control through referendum are on level with the alienated group of extreme-right oriented with few resources. Since referendum will spur public debates, increase decision-making costs and probably lead to closure and minority discrimination, most mainstream political parties discard direct democracy. Further, actually rather few among the local populace support referendum. I discuss the findings from the perspective of risk-society and fear theory (Quillian 1995, Beck 1997, Ungar 2000, Hainmueller and Hiscox 2007, Turper 2017); and theories of what explain public preferences for local referendum (Dalton, 1984; Dalton et. al. 2001; Bjørklund 2009). The data is from questionnaire surveys in 2011, 2014 and 2016, with representative population samples from the capital city, two medium sized and one small, all having experienced significant refugee settlement during the last decade.