The Backlash Effects of Denmark's Ghetto Plan

Title: The Backlash Effects of Denmark's Ghetto Plan

Authors: Mette Foged, Dr. Teresa Freitas-Monteiro and Linea Hasager

Affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Abstract:

In 2010, Denmark published its first Ghetto List. The listed areas and political ideas behind it, known as the Ghetto Plan, got extensive media coverage. The government declared that it wanted to dissipate differences in economic and cultural outcomes between individuals residing in listed neighborhoods and the rest of the country. However, the tools where modest; the housing associations of listed neighborhoods were given autonomy to regulate who moves in and subsidize moves out of the ghettos.

In this paper, we study how attitudes and identities of the initial residents change when their neighborhoods are publicly classified as ghettos. For identification, we explore the fact that neighborhoods were classified as ghettos if the share of non-Western migrants, the share of individuals not in the labor force, and the share of convicted individuals were above pre-determined cutoffs. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design we compare individuals residing in listed neighborhoods to those residing in neighborhoods that were at the margin of being listed.

Our results show that individuals in listed neighborhoods are less likely to follow Danish news, less likely to think that men and women should be treated equally, less likely to report being Christian, more likely to report that more than half of their friends have an immigrant background and more likely to give a more foreign-sounding name to their children. These results suggest that the Ghetto Plan led to cultural backlash among individuals residing in listed neighborhoods. Contrary to the political goals, listed areas seemed to have turned inward and further away from Danish norms and culture.