Roman Amarales, A., De Kleer, D.
Do far-right electoral victories increase hate crimes? We examine this question in a core democratic institution, first-past-the-post lower-chamber elections, using U.S. House races from 2006 to 2022. We theorize that the election of far-right candidates generates an 'exclusionary impulse'. We estimate the causal effect of electing such candidates on local hate crimes with a sharp regression discontinuity design. We find no overall effect when pooling all years, but clear temporal conditionality: during the Trump era (after 2016), districts that narrowly elected far-right candidates experienced significant increases in hate crimes one year later. Large-scale survey evidence suggests that these effects operate not through rapid attitude change but through heightened salience of white identity, consistent with greater in-group/out-group thinking. The findings show that far-right success can elevate bias-motivated behavior, but only under conditions of far-right normalization.