Liberalizing Refugee Hosting Policies without Losing the Vote

Inclusive refugee policies -- granting refugees the right to work, use public services, and move freely -- benefit both refugees and host countries' economies. Yet many governments hesitate to liberalize such policies, fearing electoral backlash. Can governments minimize backlash by pairing expansions of refugee rights with policies that reduce burdens on host communities? We examine this question in Uganda, Africa's largest refugee hosting country. Alongside refugee policy liberalization, Uganda mandated reallocating a share of refugee aid to communities near refugee centers. Combining refugee settlement data with election returns (2001--2021) and a generalized difference-in-differences design, we show first that the vote share of the incumbent president was significantly lower in areas with high refugee presence before the 2010 reforms. Afterwards, a one standard deviation increase in refugee presence was associated with a four percentage point increase in the vote share of the incumbent government. Using public goods data, public opinion surveys, newspaper data, and parliamentary speech records, we find that infrastructure investments in hosting communities and the reluctance of opposition parties to rally against popular policies account for our findings.