Abstract

The recent arrival of millions of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa has had profound consequences for politics and civil society in Europe. Most social science research emphasizes how the influx of refugees has resulted in popular “backlash,” as evidenced, among others, by a spike in anti-immigrant hate crimes (Frey 2020; Dancygier 2023) and the rise of far-right, xenophobic parties (Bratti et al. 2020; Bredtmann 2022). However, backlash was not the only popular response to refugee arrivals. Rather, European societies also witnessed an unprecedented wave of solidarity and civic engagement in support of refugees across the continent (Clayton 2020; Hamann and Karakayali 2016). Examples abound of citizens in host countries coming together to form what we call “refugee support organizations” (RSOs) – that is, citizen-led, durable organizations whose primary goal is to support the integration of refugees after arrival. Although these organizations are a prominent and oftentimes essential actor in the refugee integration process, they have received only scant attention in academic research thus far. What remains especially unknown is whether and how RSOs contribute to refugee integration. This motivates our research project: (how) do RSOs further the integration of refugees in host societies? We aim to implement a difference-in-differences approach in which we observe individuals over time, living either in regions in which, at some point, a new refugee support organization is founded (treatment group) or living in regions in which, at the same, no new refugee support organizations are founded (control group). In this sense, we speak of a special difference-in-difference setting as the event of treatment may occur at multiple time points (Callaway and Sant’Anna 2021; Wooldridge 2021).