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Restraining the Huddled Masses: Migration Policy and Autocratic Survival

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Abstract

What determines citizens’ freedom to exit autocracies? How does this influence global patterns of migration and democratization? Although control over citizen movement has long been central to autocratic power, modern autocracies vary considerably in how much they restrict emigration. This article shows that autocrats strategically choose emigration policy by balancing several motives. Increasing emigration can stabilize regimes by selecting a more loyal population and attracting greater investment, trade and remittances, but exposing their citizens to democracy abroad is potentially dangerous. Using a half-century of bilateral migration data, the study calculates the level and destinations of expected emigration given exogenous geographic and socioeconomic characteristics. It finds that when citizens disproportionately emigrate to democracies, countries are more likely to democratize – and that autocrats restrict emigration freedom in response. In contrast, a larger expected flow of economic emigration predicts autocratic survival and freer emigration policy. These results have important implications for autocratic politics, democratic diffusion and the political sources of migration.

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... Emigration control in authoritarian countries poses a puzzle. While some autocracies, such as the Soviet Union and North Korea, harshly restricted citizens' movements, others such as the Philippines and South Korea's military dictatorship permitted or promoted international emigration (Light 2012;Lee 2017;Miller and Peters 2020). Nonetheless, we know relatively little about the determinants of emigration policy, as the comparative scholarship on migration has focused predominantly on the politics of immigration (Lee 2017;Kapur 2010). ...
... Nonetheless, we know relatively little about the determinants of emigration policy, as the comparative scholarship on migration has focused predominantly on the politics of immigration (Lee 2017;Kapur 2010). This is an important oversight, considering the significance of control over human mobility under authoritarian rule, and migration policies' effects on the flow and well-being of migrants (Miller and Peters 2020;Massey 1999). Explaining variations in emigration policies can address a major gap in our understanding of authoritarian politics as well as global migration. ...
... The existing literature on emigration policies has predominantly centered on various actors such as migrants, local governments, bureaucrats, and international organizations (Iskander 2010;FitzGerald 2009;Kluczewska and Korneev 2022), neglecting the role of top leadership. Recent studies have made significant contributions by highlighting autocrat's calculations of the cost-benefits of emigration and the impact of migration on democratization (Miller and Peters 2020;Alemán and Woods 2014). However, these theories still fail to explain considerable variations in emigration policies observed among autocracies. ...
... An example of indirect international rents is remittances from migrant workers, such as Mexicans and Central Americans working in the United States, which periodically send some of their earnings to their families back in their countries of origin (Jenkins et al., 2011;Rosenblum, 2004). International remittances in the 21st century matched or surpassed official development assistance and foreign direct investment as a source of foreign exchange for Global South countries (Miller and Peters, 2018). ...
... Countries that capture significant amounts of such indirect rents tend to find the costs of economic inefficiency produced by clientelist mechanisms too high to bear (Robinson and Verdier, 2013). Economic inefficiency leads to downturns in the business cycle, discouraging consumption spending by non-state actors that receive remittances from abroad, which governments can only capture when individual recipients spend such indirect rents in the domestic economy (Miller and Peters, 2018;Richter and Steiner, 2008). ...
Article
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The political science literature often points to populism as the cause of democratic backsliding. The literature purports that populism undermines democracy's liberal component, meaning the horizontal checks and balances on executive power by legislatures and courts and the vertical checks and balances by civil society, such as a free press and social movements. Populists promote political polarization to build sustainable ruling coalitions during and between elections that legitimize and support the illiberal policies above. However, this debate often ignores the economic tools that populists in power possess, such as capturing direct and indirect international rents to finance clientelist mechanisms to co-opt political support. This paper contributes to the rich literature on how economic rent conditions the negative relationship between populism and liberalism by disaggregating the moderating effects of direct and indirect international rents through panel regression models in 18 Latin American countries from 1991 to 2019. I find that direct international rents, such as natural resource rents, moderated a deepening in processes of democratic backsliding. Contrastingly, indirect international rents, such as remittances, moderately mitigated democratic backsliding.
... An important argument in the literature holds that political repression-or the potential thereof-is a major factor why people leave ( Hirschman 1993 ;Miller and Peters 2020 ), i.e., reverses the causal order between migration and political illiberalism vis-à-vis our main argument. On the face of it, this idea does not fully fit our case, however, since the governments of Central and Eastern Europe cannot be considered repressive in the classic sense. ...
Article
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Abstracts In many regions of the world, liberal politics is on the retreat. This development is usually explained with reference to inherently political phenomena. We propose an alternative explanation, linking democratic backsliding to deep-reaching demographic change caused by mass emigration. We argue that because migrants tend to be more politically liberal, their departure, if quantitatively significant, can hurt liberal democracy. Empirically, we focus on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Since 2004, the region has lost about 9 percent of its population due to migration to Western Europe. Drawing on data from 430,000 individuals and a panel analysis, we show that CEE migrants systematically hold more liberal values than non-migrants and that their exit went along with a deterioration of democracy in their home countries. Further analyses show that the mechanism we describe generalizes to various other world regions. Mass emigration may pose a challenge to democratic development in migrant-sending countries around the globe.
... An important argument in the literature holds that political repression-or the potential thereof-is a major factor why people leave (Hirschman 1993;Miller and Peters 2020), i.e., reverses the causal order between migration and political illiberalism vis-à-vis our main argument. On the face of it, this idea does not fully fit our case, however, since the governments of Central and Eastern Europe cannot be considered repressive in the classic sense. ...
Article
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In many regions of the world, liberal politics is on the retreat. This development is usually explained with reference to inherently political phenomena. We propose an alternative explanation, linking democratic backsliding to deep-reaching demographic change caused by mass emigration. We argue that because migrants tend to be more politically liberal, their departure, if quantitatively significant, can hurt liberal democracy. Empirically, we focus on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Since 2004, the region has lost about 9 percent of its population due to migration to Western Europe. Drawing on data from 430,000 individuals and a panel analysis, we show that CEE migrants systematically hold more liberal values than non-migrants, and that their exit went along with a deterioration of democracy in their home countries. Further analyses show that the mechanism we describe generalizes to various other world regions. Mass emigration may pose a challenge to democratic development in migrant-sending countries around the globe.
... Research on autocratic resilience rarely builds upon migration politics, and only a few studies have looked at the connection between migration and autocratic survival. Miller and Peters (2020) investigated how restrictive emigration policies tend to prevent anti-regime activism from abroad, and Natter (2020) studied how migration reforms sought to consolidate the Moroccan monarchy. This article also contributes to discussions on the resource curse and the relation between oil and regime survival in autocracies and democracies (Ross 2001;Smith 2004). ...
... This part will identify the complexity of refugee distinction from the immigrants which creates vagueness and ambiguities in the application of non-refoulement principle. Since, after the end of the Cold War, both refugee and IDP (Internally Displaced People) populations are now at record levels (Miller and Peters 2018), 10 and such movement of IDPs within conflict countries eventually leading to the flow of refugees out of conflict countries is clearly a humanitarian disaster (Laura 2002 upon one theory due to the complex macro-level phenomenon of refugee issues as (Black 2001) quoting Bascom noted "there is no 'theory of refugees'. 13 His work illustrates why a rational, linear model is impracticable for correctly reflecting the truth that refugeeness is a complicated and relatively non-rational phenomenon. ...
Thesis
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Europe has been criticised for the differential treatment of Ukrainian and Syrian refugees during the crisis of 2015 and 2022 respectively. However, the unprecedented resolve the EU has shown to manage the refugee crisis through policies and programs could set an example for the next crisis thus inspiring hope for refugees. Through the doctrinal method, I scrutinise how the EU was able to manage the Ukrainian influx of refugees far better than Syrian refugees and the lesson that can be drawn and how that can push for a more humanitarian approach to handle such crisis globally in-line with international obligation. Though the focus is Europe, we shall analyse the international practices and regional conventions to understand how countries across the globe have accepted the non-refoulement principle and how it gained the jus-cogens status. This thesis studies the gradual evolution of refugee laws and policies in the EU and how it has emboldened the jus cogens nature of non-refoulement peeking through the Syrian crisis and Ukrainian crisis. The thesis examines the EU documents on asylum and refugees and how each crisis has unfolded the cracks in those papers and rifts between the nations then we shall see how the EU addressed those concerns. The aim is to observe how refugee friendly laws are formulated and its contribution to uphold the non-refoulement principle both in words and action. The finding suggests that Europe has not been so benevolent toward refugees though its documents are in line with international laws and sometimes even more generous and descriptive, barring the recent Ukrainian crisis. The thesis is based on the premise that to undo a precedent set in a democratic egalitarian society is challenging so the warm treatment to the Ukrainian refugee could set an example to re-evoke Temporary Protection Directive in other refugee crises. Since the Ukraine war is ongoing and there are many factors that played for the refugee management, further research is encouraged and how the EU policy on asylum would take turn would be a key aspect to keep an eye on.
... The analysis tested for possible norm diffusion and social remittances by using variables that measure communication frequency with family abroad and migrant destination. Those who frequently communicate with family abroad or have family members residing in democratic countries should be exposed to greater democratic norms (Miller and Peters 2020;Tuccio et al. 2019). Therefore, the expectation is that Latin Americans with migrant linkages outside of financial remittances should have lower support for military coups. ...
Article
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Are Latin American presidents at greater risk for removal in remittance-dependent countries? Departing from the debate about whether remittances produce democratic or autocratic outcomes, this article asks whether remittances contribute to presidential removals, which are an important characteristic of Latin American democracies since the Third Wave. It uses questions about supporting a military coup under high corruption and crime scenarios to gauge remittance recipients’ support for early removal of a president. It finds that remittances create a constituency that tolerates military coups. Using data from Martínez (2021), the analysis also shows that remittances increase the risk of removal for presidents who face a greater number of scandals; but remittances do not pose this threat under poor economic performance.
... Gathering such data on the delivery of authoritarian propaganda is a serious challenge, particularly given that many authoritarian regimes limit immigration and domestic travel by foreigners. 32 North Korea, however, offers an unusual opportunity to test our theory's empirical implications. ...
Article
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We argue that authoritarian regimes engage in subnational propaganda targeting in pursuit of political survival. Drawing on an original dataset of visual and text propaganda collected inside North Korea, we show that the regime in Pyongyang tailors messaging to elites and masses differently. We outline a schema of four strategies and seven themes that authoritarian regimes commonly utilize when crafting propaganda, theorize variations in their use, and test these variations empirically, using a combination of qualitative analysis, regression, and machine-learning-based text analysis. We demonstrate that the North Korean regime targets Pyongyang-based elites with co-optational messages promising prosperity, modernization, and economic benefit, while the masses outside of Pyongyang are more likely to receive mobilizational messages focused on agricultural productivity. North Korean propaganda also legitimates the regime differently based on audience: legitimation messages to elites emphasize ideological themes related to the party, reassuring elites of the regime's commitment to preserving their privileged status. By contrast, legitimation messages in rural areas emphasize security themes, reminding the masses of why their sacrifices are necessary. The manuscript contributes to scholarly understanding of authoritarian propaganda by providing a theoretical logic for subnational propaganda targeting in non-democracies, and showing that this logic is empirically substantiated.
... A prime example of indirect international rents is remittances from migrant workers that periodically send some of their earnings to their families back to their countries of origin (Jenkins et al., 2011;Rosenblum, 2004). International remittances during the 21 st century had "three times the weight of official development aid and have even outgrown foreign direct investments," making this source of indirect rent one of the primary sources of foreign exchange in the Global South (Miller & Peters, 2018;Warnecke-Berger, 2020, p. 121). ...
Article
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I explore the relationships between macroeconomic conditions and how the forms of integration into the global economy affect homicide rates in 21 high-violence countries from 2000 to 2018. The analysis focuses on countries integrated into the global economy by accruing international economic rents. I use data from 2000 to 2018 to analyse how resource rents and remittances moderated the relationship between business cycles and high homicide rates. Moreover, I also evaluate how socioeconomic conditions mediate the above relationship. The results indicate that natural resource rents conditioned a procyclical relationship between business cycles and homicide rates. Contrastingly, remittances conditioned a countercyclical relationship between business cycles and homicide rates. The findings contribute to the rich and growing economic criminology and international political economy literature investigating how international rents condition subnational violence.
... Our research suggests these may have unrecognized international implications. In addition to demonstrating the reputational effect of repression (Pierskalla 2009), coups (Bell and Sudduth 2017;Powell 2012), and domestic policy negotiations (Canes-Wrone and de Marchi 2002) in our experiment, we use postexperiment questions (see Appendix) to probe the international reputational effects of anti-immigration restrictions (Miller and Peters 2020), discrimination against minorities (Blaydes and Linzer 2012), the nationalization of private industry (Haber and Menaldo 2011), and purges (Magaloni 2008). 5 We find preliminary evidence that all of these domestic choices could have international reputational consequences. ...
Article
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Existing research finds that leaders develop international reputations based on their past behavior on the international stage. We argue that leaders’ domestic choices can also influence their international reputations, perhaps as much as their past foreign policy decisions do. Using formal theory and intuitive argumentation, we develop an overarching framework to predict how much any domestic choice will affect a leader’s international reputation. We theorize that certain domestic choices can inform expectations about future international crisis behavior based on the extent to which (1) the costs at stake are similar to those of an international crisis and (2) the domestic issue is salient relative to foreign policy. We use conjoint experiments and other evidence to show that many domestic choices have significant international reputational effects. There is some evidence that the reputational effect of certain domestic choices may equal that of fighting in a previous international crisis.
... While this hypothesis is compelling, it needs empirical backing. This is the more so when existing research on autocratic regimes suggests that emigration can be a double-edged sword: while capable of boosting their survival and helping produce quiescent populations, emigration to democracies can also lead to the diffusion of democratic norms and to an increase in political protest (Escribà-Folch et al., 2018;Miller & Peters, 2020;Peters & Miller, 2022). Indeed, a growing body of literature on social and political remittances, more specifically, has explored how the flow of political principles, vocabulary, and practices can lead to empowerment and democratisation in sending countries (Ahmadov & Sasse, 2016;Kessler & Rother, 2016;Krawatzek & Müller-Funk, 2019). ...
Article
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While the politics of immigration in destination countries has been a prominent topic of research in comparative political science in Europe, the same does not apply to emigration and to the perspective of peripherical EU countries. This is true even though the flows of people moving from east to west and from south to north pose potentially significant challenges to 'sending countries' in Europe. This article sets up a research agenda aimed at contributing to redress this imbalance. It highlights the need to explore more systematically themes such as (1) the impact of emigration on the political behaviour of both those who stay and those who leave and (2) and how emigration is framed and politicized by relevant societal actors. Ultimately, it draws attention to the fact that a lot of the questions that have been asked about 'entry' (immigration) need to be asked about 'exit' too (emigration).
... Left at this, emigration should generally lead to less politically active populations, bolstering the survival of autocratic and democratic regimes alike (Miller and Peters 2020). However, we argue that it also matters where emigrants go. ...
Article
How does migration affect global patterns of political violence and protest? While political scientists have examined the links between trade and conflict, less attention has been paid to the links between migration and conflict. In this paper, we show that greater emigration reduces domestic political violence by providing exit opportunities for aggrieved citizens and economic benefits to those who remain. Emigration also reduces non-violent forms of political contestation, including protests and strikes, implying that high emigration rates can produce relatively quiescent populations. However, larger flows of emigrants to democracies can increase non-violent protest in autocracies, as exposure to freer countries spreads democratic norms and the tools of peaceful opposition. We use instrumental variables analysis to account for the endogeneity of migration flows and find robust results for a range of indicators of civil violence and protest from 1960 to 2010.
... Research on autocratic resilience rarely builds upon migration politics, and only a few studies have looked at the connection between migration and autocratic survival. Miller and Peters (2020) investigated how restrictive emigration policies tend to prevent anti-regime activism from abroad, and Natter (2020) studied how migration reforms sought to consolidate the Moroccan monarchy. This article also contributes to discussions on the resource curse and the relation between oil and regime survival in autocracies and democracies (Ross 2001;Smith 2004). ...
Article
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How was the Saudi monarchy able to stave off the Arab Spring? One answer to this question lies in migration politics, which are integral to the regime’s ad hoc survival strategies. An analysis of migration politics, moreover, brings to light longstanding dynamics of state transformation in what remains one of the largest immigration countries in the world. Drawing on discourse analysis, institutional history, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in state bureaucracies, I explore the critical, albeit under-researched, role of migration politics in political change from the 1991 Gulf crisis to the 2011 uprisings. First, I show that, in times of crisis, Saudi monarchs made migration a central political issue: while maintaining mass immigration into the country, they used immigrants as scapegoats to deflect popular grievances and further individual power-seeking agendas. Secondly, I demonstrate that migration became a policy domain with its own rules, bureaucratic practices, power relations and rationalities – a process designed to impose a state monopoly over migration control. Thirdly, I introduce the notion of ‘migration rent’ and use it to describe the changing social and power relations between migrants, citizens and the state. Finally, I suggest that migration politics are key to understanding both short- and long-term political change. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.1948325 .
... mass exit and foreign influence) and the benefits of emigration (e.g. expelling dissidents and receiving remittances) (Miller and Peters, 2015). ...
Thesis
This dissertation seeks to understand why some policymakers open their borders to unskilled immigrants while others restrict immigration, by looking at the effects of natural resource wealth on pro-immigration firms and policymakers. The three empirical chapters in the dissertation examine the mechanisms through which revenues from capital-intensive natural resources shape immigration policy toward low-skilled workers from the developing world. I find that natural resource wealth has differential effects on immigration policy under different political institutions. Chapter 3 explores the link between natural resource wealth and immigration policy formation in wealthy democracies. In this chapter, I find that substantial natural resource wealth leads to policy restrictions on immigration inflows by reducing the size of the pro-immigration business coalition. Moreover, trade liberalization exacerbates this negative effect of natural resource income on immigration policy openness by expediting firm deaths in the tradable sector. These adverse effects do not materialize in economies lacking resource income, so firms there seek to remain viable under trade liberalization by supporting pro-immigration policy. In Chapter 4, I test the hypotheses and find similar results by using the data on U.S. senators’ voting behavior on immigration bills from 1964 to 2008. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the effects of natural resource rents on the immigration policies of 13 relatively wealthy autocracies after World War II. In contrast to Chapters 3 and 4, I find that the natural resource wealth is positively associated with more open immigration policy in autocracies. As the distribution of resource rents in rentier autocracies reduces the incentive of domestic labor to enter the labor force, rentier states rely on migrant workers to meet the demand for low-skilled labor. Autocrats without resource rents, however, lack capacity for redistribution, so they use policies that provide people with wages in exchange for their labor while restricting immigration. The remaining chapters provide supplementary information such as details on immigration policy index construction and additional evidence from field research. I conclude the dissertation with future research suggestions and broader implications for political science research.
... Yet the 'regime effect' debate has recently been revived from two sides: On the one hand, qualitative researchers have sought to pin down the distinctiveness of autocratic im-and emigration policy by emphasising how population control, and thus coercive migration policies, are key to assuring autocratic regime survival (de Haas and Vezzoli 2011;Filomeno and Vicino 2020;Natter 2018;Tsourapas 2018). At the same time, quantitative scholars have mobilised large-scale databases to explain the openness or restrictiveness of migration policies through countries' categorisation as either autocratic or democratic (Miller and Peters 2020;Ruhs 2011;Shin 2017). Such research (often implicitly) reinforces the assumption of an intrinsic link between liberal immigration policy and democracy, as well as restrictive immigration policy and autocracy. ...
Article
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How does democratisation affect the politics of migration? This paper analyses Tunisian immigration and emigration politics in the decade before and after the 2011 revolution, drawing on 57 interviews with Tunisian high-level civil servants, as well as representatives of civil society and international organisations. It shows that the democratisation of policy processes and the expansion of citizens’ political freedoms did not result in pro-migrant rights reforms, but instead led to the continuation of restrictive migration policies inherited from Tunisia’s authoritarian past. The paper explains this by dissecting the ambiguous effects of democratisation on political legitimisation, as well as on inter-institutional and transnational dynamics of migration policymaking. It demonstrates that despite the unprecedented dynamism of Tunisian civil society and efforts of various institutional actors to reform Tunisia’s security-driven migration policy, there were both domestic and international forces that put brakes on migration reform. By focussing on the intricacies of Tunisian migration policymaking, this analysis allows to advance theory-building on the link between political regimes and migration politics, to revisit regime transformations from the inside and to overcome the still-dominant Eurocentrism in scholarly debates on North African migration policies.
... The exit of those 15 most discontented could also weaken the voice of those who stay (Hirschman 1970). Thus, if we For an account of the potential benefits of emigration to autocrats, see Miller & Peters (2020). 15 ! 12 leave aside the potential long-term competitive dynamics among the multiple jurisdictions, costless mobility need not produce growth-promoting institutional change. ...
Preprint
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Discussions on global justice rest on the implicit assumption that a substantial reduction of the costs of exit from poor countries is not likely to have a significant positive effect on these countries’ institutions and, thus, on their prospects for sustained economic growth. Given the theoretical and empirical support for the contrary causal hypothesis, this article brings attention to its overlooked normative implications. In the absence of compelling justifications for rich countries’ stringent immigration regimes, there would be no rational basis for relegating them to the status of background conditions in our explanation of global poverty. At the same time, the causal role of those regimes should lead us to reconsider the limits of the justifications offered in their defense.
... The costs associated with this brain-drain unquestionably concern the government. Yet, the relative inaction on stemming the outflow has a logical explanation, since the emigration may provide a "safety valve" of sorts against the buildup of antiestablishment pressures (Miller & Peters, 2020). ...
Article
Contemporary Malaysia is an amalgamation of regions with distinct historical origins and features that provide the raw material for strong regional identities. The Malay‐Muslim nature of the nation‐building project led by the dominant United Malays Nasional Organisation (UMNO) has reified regional identities by sharpening the contrast between them and Malaysia’s political center. Yet while regional identities are often pronounced, Malaysian politics are highly centralized, and neither deep fragmentation along regional lines nor meaningful secessionist movements have materialized. That results from Malaysia’s institutional features and the primacy of highly essentialized, trans‐regional ethno‐religious identities. This article examines the process of regional and ethnic identity formation, which has occurred in an endogenous manner that draws from and reinforces the dominance of UMNO and its political heartland. It argues that the embrace of the ethno‐religious identities has enabled the primacy of Malay‐Muslim considerations in national political discourse and consequently crowded out particularistic regional demands.
... To the contrary, individual exit-whether from the periphery to the peninsula's progressive cities or from those cities to locations abroad-has long been an important channel to escape the perceived overreach of hegemonic UMNO's nation-building project. 8 Similar measures have been noted in other autocratic regimes around the world (Miller and Peters 2020). ...
... But remittances that are being used for the private provision of local public goods may reduce the effectiveness of state patronage and thus promote political change (Adida and Girod, 2011;Doyle, 2015;Pfutze, 2014;Tyburski, 2012). Miller and Peters, (2018) and Peters and Miller (2018) furthermore show that emigration may increase non-violent demand for political change. ...
Chapter
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International migration flows are shaping world politics in a variety of ways. This chapter summarizes existing evidence on the mechanisms through which these flows affect political attitudes and participation in the countries from where the migrants originate. A comparison is made between the effects of international migration on political institutions in Cape Verde and Mozambique, which both have strong migratory traditions. Emigration from Cape Verde is characterized by relatively high-skilled migration to Portugal and other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, while emigration from Mozambique is mostly driven by unskilled labor flows into South Africa. The results that we describe show that international migration substantially increases political participation in both settings. The demand for political accountability and electoral participation substantially increases after being exposed to better democratic political norms and knowledge about electoral processes. This effect grows with citizens’ social proximity, which is characterized as opportunities for personal interaction. Overall, we provide evidence that both South–North as well as South–South international migration strengthen democracy in the poorest countries.
... This perspective has identified the considerable material gains that countries of origin-authoritarian or otherwise-stand to gain from mass emigration, primarily in the form of remittances (De Haas 2010). Yet, contrary to the expectations of this line of thinking, not all autocracies allow mass emigration (Miller and Peters 2020). Even those that do may continue to target specific citizens living abroad. ...
Article
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How, when, and why does a state take repressive action against individuals residing outside its territorial jurisdiction? Beyond state-led domestic forms of control over citizens living within their legal borders, autocracies also seek to target those abroad—from African states’ sponsoring violence against exiled dissidents to Central Asian republics’ extraditions of political émigrés, and from the adoption of spyware software to monitor digital activism across Latin America to enforced disappearances of East Asian expatriates. Despite growing global interconnectedness, the field of international studies currently lacks an adequate comparative framework for analyzing how autocracies adapt to growing cross-border mobility. I argue that the rise of global migration flows has contributed to the emergence of “transnational authoritarianism,” as autocracies aim to both maximize material gains from citizens’ “exit” and minimize political risks by controlling their “voice” abroad. I demonstrate that governments develop strategies of transnational repression, legitimation, and co-optation that transcend state borders, as well as co-operation with a range of non-state actors. Bringing work on the international politics of migration in conversation with the literature on authoritarianism, I provide illustrative examples drawn from a range of transnational authoritarian practices by the fifty countries categorized as “Not Free” by Freedom House in 2019, covering much of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America. I sketch an emerging field of international studies research around the novel means that autocracies employ to exercise power over populations abroad, while shedding light on the evolving nature of global authoritarianism.
Article
Governments routinely wage civil conflicts in ways that disrupt civilians' lives and livelihoods, creating harmful externalities like internal displacement. Both fighting and displacement hinder economic activity, jeopardizing popular support for governments and reducing the future gains of governance. How do states fight when using force induces migration and thus risks popular discontent? I model a conflict where government efforts to control territory spur displacement, creating economic disruption that can spark tension between displaced civilians and government supporters. The risk of losing popular support leads the government to modify its tactics. While the government could mitigate the disruptive consequences of displacement by fighting less, I find another, more troubling, strategy. Governments may engage in preemptive violence to prevent migration. Moreover, economic downturns exacerbate migration incentives and, I find, can also increase violence against civilians. Governments anticipating displacement fight more intense conflicts today to see relatively less migration in the future.
Article
Sometimes, countries target immigration policies to citizens of authoritarian regimes with the goal of influencing these regimes’ politics. Which kinds of immigration rules are optimal anti-authoritarian policies and which trade-offs do policy-makers face? We analyze a game-theoretic model in which a destination country, an autocrat, and a citizen interact. The citizen can engage in protest and emigrate while the autocrat can redistribute and repress to counter these threats. A revolution occurs if the autocrat does not repress and the citizen protests. Policy-makers in destination countries anticipate that in equilibrium, a more permissive immigration policy reduces repression but also reduces protesting. Therefore, the optimal policy strikes a balance between these two effects. A concern for improving the citizen’s welfare renders policy more permissible while the desire to punish the autocrat has an ambiguous effect. Finally, we show that a revolution and large-scale emigration are difficult to achieve at the same time.
Book
Politics of the North Korean Diaspora examines how authoritarian security concerns shape global diaspora politics. Empirically, it traces the recent emergence of a North Korean diaspora – a globally-dispersed population of North Korean émigrés – and argues that the non-democratic nature of the DPRK homeland regime fundamentally shapes diasporic politics. Pyongyang perceives the diaspora as a threat to regime security, and attempts to dissuade emigration, de-legitimate diasporic voices, and deter or disrupt diasporic political activity, including through extraterritorial violence and transnational repression. This, in turn, shapes the North Korean diaspora's perceptions of citizenship and patterns of diasporic political engagement: North Korean émigrés have internalized many host country norms, particularly the civil and participatory dimensions of democratic citizenship, and émigrés have played important roles in both host-country and global politics. This Element provides new empirical evidence on the North Korean diaspora; demonstrates that regime type is an important, understudied factor shaping transnational and diasporic politics; and contributes to our understanding of comparative authoritarianism's global impact.
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This article provides evidence that many Central Americans who have joined the migrant caravans to the north manifest a profound discontent with the political institutions of their home countries. It is based on surveys with migrants in refugee centres, compared with similar data from the AmericasBarometer survey, and complemented with contextual qualitative data on the experience of immigrants passing through Mexico. The article shows that several Central Americans in route to the north do not trust their political institutions and express little support for their political system. It demonstrates that in contexts where economic instability, rampant crime, and environmental uncertainty prevail, many citizens keep exiting their countries under the conviction that government institutions have lost the capability to protect them from existential threats.
Article
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Most autocracies restrict emigration yet still allow some citizens to exit. How do these regimes decide who can leave? We argue that many autocracies strategically target anti-regime actors for emigration, thereby crafting a more loyal population without the drawbacks of persistent co-optation or repression. However, this generates problematic incentives for citizens to join opposition activity to secure exit. In response, autocracies simultaneously punish dissidents for attempting to emigrate, screening out all but the most determined opponents. To test our theory, we examine an original data set coded from over 20,000 pages of declassified emigration applications from East Germany's state archives. In the first individual-level test of an autocracy's emigration decisions, we find that active opposition promoted emigration approval but also punishment for applying. Pensioners were also more likely to secure exit, and professionals were less likely. Our results shed light on global migration's political sources and an overlooked strategy of autocratic resilience.
Article
We argue that authoritarian regimes engage in subnational propaganda targeting in pursuit of political survival. Drawing on an original dataset of propaganda collected inside North Korea, we show that the regime tailors messaging to elites and masses differently. We outline a schema of strategies and themes that authoritarian regimes utilize when crafting propaganda, theorize variations in their use, and test these variations empirically, using qualitative analysis, regression, and text analysis. We demonstrate that the North Korean regime targets Pyongyang-based elites with co-optational messages promising economic benefit, while the masses receive mobilizational messages focused on agricultural productivity. North Korean propaganda also legitimates the regime differently based on audience: messages to elites reassure them of their privileged status but messages to the masses remind them of why their sacrifices are necessary.
Article
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It is widely believed that there’s a right to emigrate. But what justifies this right? This paper explores this issue. It first argues that existing defenses of the right to emigrate are incomplete. It then outlines a novel egalitarian defense of the right to emigrate, on which that right is in part justified as a protection against social inequality. After considering objections, it argues that this account of the right to emigrate entails a limited right to immigrate and that states are under a collective duty to institute a global migration system which protects effective exit.
Chapter
Migration is among the central domestic and global political issues of today. Yet the causes and consequences - and the relationship between migration and global markets – are poorly understood. Migration is both costly and risky, so why do people decide to migrate? What are the political, social, economic, and environmental factors that cause people to leave their homes and seek a better life elsewhere? Leblang and Helms argue that political factors - the ability to participate in the political life of a destination - are as important as economic and social factors. Most migrants don't cut ties with their homeland but continue to be engaged, both economically and politically. Migrants continue to serve as a conduit for information, helping drive investment to their homelands. The authors combine theory with a wealth of micro and macro evidence to demonstrate that migration isn't static, after all, but continuously fluid.
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Immigration presents a fundamental challenge to the nation-state and is a key political priority for governments worldwide. However, knowledge of the politics of immigration remains largely limited to liberal states of the Global North. In this book, Katharina Natter draws on extensive fieldwork and archival research to compare immigration policymaking in authoritarian Morocco and democratizing Tunisia. Through this analysis, Natter advances theory-building on immigration beyond the liberal state and demonstrates how immigration politics – or how a state deals with 'the other' – can provide valuable insights into the inner workings of political regimes. Connecting scholarship from comparative politics, international relations and sociology across the Global North and Global South, Natter's highly original study challenges long-held assumptions and reveals the fascinating interplay between immigration, political regimes, and modern statehood around the world.
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This paper introduces the Extraterritorial Rights and Restrictions dataset (EVRR), the first global time-series dataset of non-resident citizen voting policies and procedures. Although there have been previous efforts to document external voting, no existing data source simultaneously captures the scale (195 countries), time frame (71 years), and level of detail concerning extraterritorial voting rights and restrictions (over 20 variables). After a brief overview of prior datasets, we introduce EVRR coding criteria with a focus on conceptual clarity and transparency. Descriptive analysis of the dataset reveals both the steady expansion of extraterritorial voting as well as several regional and temporal trends of voting rights restrictions. Finally, we revisit and extend the work of two groundbreaking cross-national studies focused on the causes and effects of external voting rights. Using EVRR data we demonstrate that including more fine-grained aspects of extraterritorial voting provisions in these analyses improves understanding of important political and economic outcomes.
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This paper examines the political attributes of emigrants and how their departure affects the electoral outcomes in their home countries. I argue that emigrants are different from those who remain in their political preferences as well as economic attributes, such that large-scale emigration changes the distribution of voters in sending countries. Emigration can also directly affect the policy preferences of individuals who stay in their home countries. I test these arguments in seven Central and Eastern European countries, using individual-level surveys and region-level data on emigration and elections. To address potential endogeneity issues, I use instrumental variable analysis, leveraging the surge of Polish emigration to the United Kingdom after the EU enlargement. I find that emigrants from Central and Eastern Europe tend to be younger, highly educated, and politically more progressive and that the vote shares of far-right parties are larger in regions with higher emigration rates. Also, I find that exposure to large-scale emigration affects the vote choices of individuals who remain.
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To stop refugees and migrants, states have enlisted neighboring third countries to act as buffers, thereby outsourcing border security. With many sub-Saharan migrants transiting North Africa, these regimes there have increasingly served as the EU’s gendarme. Existing studies on the topic are state-centric, and little is known about the attitudes of citizens in buffer states. How do they view their state carrying out another’s border security? Leveraging an original, nationally-representative survey, we find that 66 percent of Morocco’s citizens oppose their country aiding border externalization. We advance an important initiative to “de-center” research on border externalization.
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Immigration policy is often portrayed as a zero-sum trade-off between labor and capital or between high- and low-skilled labor. Many have attributed the rise of populist politicians and populist movements to immigrants and/or immigration policy. While immigration has distributional implications, we argue that something is clearly missing from the discussion: the fact that migrants are an engine of globalization, especially for countries in the Global South. Migration and migrant networks serve to expand economic markets, distribute information across national borders, and diffuse democratic norms and practices throughout the world, increasing trade and investment flows. We further argue that many commentators have got the causal relationship backward: Instead of immigration reducing support for globalization, we argue that trade, financial flows, and offshoring have reduced support for immigration among the elite and a vocal plurality of citizens in the Global North. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
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Some existing human trafficking research has examined how trafficking laws and regulations deter traffickers. This research, however, has paid little attention to how states’ freedom-of-movement policies influence human trafficking. Existing policy debates suggest two possible effects. Europe’s experiences with open borders have led to claims that freedom of movement decreases the likelihood that traffickers are detected, thus making human trafficking in and out of states more likely. By contrast, movement restrictions could create an environment in which people become more vulnerable to traffickers. We use data from 182 countries from 2001 to 2017 to test whether freedom of movement increases or decreases human trafficking flows. We find that it is necessary, theoretically and empirically, to consider freedom of foreign movement both locally and in a state’s neighborhood, because freedom of movement increases human trafficking when the local and neighborhood practices diverge from each other.
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Scholars of international relations (IR) from the United States, like any country, view the world with particular perspectives and beliefs that shape their perceptions, judgments, and worldviews. These perspectives have the potential to affect the answers to a host of important questions—in part by shaping the questions that get asked in the first place. All scholars are potentially affected by national bias, but American bias matters more than others. This special issue focuses on two issues: attention and accuracy in IR research. While previous scholarship has raised principally normative or theoretical concerns about American dominance in IR, our work is heavily empirical and engages directly with the field's mainstream neopositivist approach. The collected articles provide specific, fine-grained examples of how American perspectives matter for IR, using evidence from survey experiments, quantitative datasets, and more. Our evidence suggests that American perspectives, left unexamined, negatively affect our field's research. Still, the essays in this special issue remain bullish about the field's neopositivist project overall. We also offer concrete steps for taking on the problems we identify, and improving our field's scholarship.
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Remittances, money sent from migrant workers to their country of origin, have increased significantly over the past two decades. Their growing importance has been accompanied by a vast interest in their mechanisms and ramifications. A wide array of work focuses on how remittances are sent and to what effect. This study, however, is interested in a much less explored approach: the way remittances are regulated and what explains variation in governmental efforts to regulate. This variation is first established through the creation of a Regulation Index that looks at 46 countries. It then investigates three factors that could influence this variation: a country's dependence on remittances, state capacity and regime type. Through descriptive and statistical analysis, the study finds that dependence on remittances does not explain why a country does or doesn't regulate. Testing for state capacity does not provide convincing results, suggesting that it is not because countries can regulate that they do so. However, it appears that levels of democratization can impact levels of remittance regulation. We suspect this is because different regimes have different interests and remittances can either help or hinder their achievement.
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Which national characteristics do voluntary migrants prioritize when considering destinations? Although this question is salient for policymakers, extant studies face challenges when seeking to identify how various pull factors shape destination preferences. Surveys of migrants are typically conducted after they arrive, introducing selection bias and post-hoc reasoning. Moreover, desirable national characteristics tend to co-vary, implying that observed relationships with migration flows may be confounded. In this article, we identify the destination preferences of prospective migrants by drawing on a sample of 8,500 respondents from five sending states across the Middle East and North Africa. Prospective migrants completed a series of conjoint survey tasks in which they chose between two destinations with randomly varying characteristics. The results reveal a clear hierarchy of preferences, with prospective migrants placing the greatest priority on liberal democratic governance and employment prospects. The availability of welfare benefits acted as a secondary consideration, while geographic distance and co-ethnic stock did not strongly predict initial destination preferences. While the rank order of these considerations remains consistent across national samples, our results suggest that respondents from different economic and political backgrounds vary in how they navigate potential tradeoffs between national characteristics. These findings address post-arrival bias in extant studies by revealing prospective migrants’ preferences before they interact with the opportunity structures that facilitate and restrict entry into desirable destinations.
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How do economic opportunities abroad affect citizens’ ability to exit an authoritarian regime? This article theorizes the conditions under which authoritarian leaders will perceive emigration as a threat and use imprisonment instead of other types of anti-emigration measures to prevent mass emigration. Using data from communist East Germany's secret prisoner database that we reassembled based on archival material, the authors show that as economic opportunities in West Germany increased, the number of East German exit prisoners – political prisoners arrested for attempting to cross the border illegally – also rose. The study's causal identification strategy exploits occupation-specific differences in the changing economic opportunities between East and West Germany. Using differential access to West German television, it also sheds light on the informational mechanism underlying the main finding; cross-national data are leveraged to present evidence of the external validity of the estimates. The results highlight how global economic disparities affect politics within authoritarian regimes.
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Previous work suggests that remittances enable governments to reduce spending on public services and divert resources to serve their own interests. We argue this need not occur. Building on recent work which shows that the impact of remittances is contingent on the domestic environment in remittance-receiving countries, we hypothesize that (1) remittances are more likely to increase government spending on public services in democracies than in autocracies and (2) remittances are more likely to finance activities that deter political competition in autocracies than in democracies. Using a sample of 105 developing countries from 1985 through 2008, we find strong support for our hypotheses when examining the impact of remittances on public education, health, and military spending. We also provide suggestive evidence for the mechanism underpinning our results: micro-level evidence on remittance recipients’ preferences and political engagement.
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In spatial econometrics, W refers to the matrix that weights the value of the spatially lagged variable of other units. As unimportant as it may appear, W specifies, or at least ought to specify, why and how other units of analysis affect the unit under observation. This article shows that theory must inform five crucial specification choices taken by researchers. Specifically, the connectivity variable employed in W must capture the causal mechanism of spatial dependence. The specification of W further determines the relative relevance of source units from which spatial dependence emanates, and whether receiving units are assumed to be identically or differentially exposed to spatial stimulus. Multiple dimensions of spatial dependence can be modeled as independent, substitutive or conditional links. Finally, spatial effects need not go exclusively in one direction, but can be bi-directional; recipients can simultaneously experience positive spatial dependence from some sources and negative dependence from others. The importance of W stands in stark contrast to applied researchers’ typical use of crude proxy variables (such as geographical proximity) to measure true connectivity, and the practice of adopting standard modeling conventions rather than substantive theory to specify W. This study demonstrates which assumptions these conventions impose on specification choices, and argues that theories of spatial dependence will often conflict with them.
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According to recent research, 215 million people—approximately 3% of the world’s population—live in a different country from that of their birth. Population flows take place notably from the developing South to the developed North, although a considerable volume of migration is of the South–South type (Ratha and Shaw 2007; Castles and Miller 2009; World Bank 2011). These movements of people are accompanied by financial, social, and political remittances sent by migrants to their countries of origin. In many developing countries, financial remittances have become a crucial source of foreign exchange and a potential tool for development. In 2010, remittance flows to developing countries were estimated to have exceeded $325 billion, surpassing the inflows of foreign aid and, in some cases, foreign direct investment (World Bank 2006, 2011). Migrants also transfer knowledge, ideas, values, and expectations acquired in the host country back to their communities of origin in the form of socia ...
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Monitoring Migration Migrant “stock” data—the number of people living in a country other than the one in which they were born—are frequently used to understand contemporary trends in international migration, but the data are severely limited. Abel and Sander (p. 1520 ) present a set of global bilateral migration flows estimated from sequential stock data in 5-year intervals. The percentage of the world population moving over 5-year periods has not shown dramatic changes between 1995 and 2010. People from individual African countries tended to move within the continent, whereas people from Europe tended to move to very diverse locations.
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An indicator of globalization is the growing number of humans crossing national borders. In contrast to explanations for flows of goods and capital, migration research has concentrated on unilateral movements to rich democracies. This focus ignores the bilateral determinants of migration and stymies empirical and theoretical inquiry. The theoretical insights proposed here show how the regime type of both sending and receiving countries influences human migration. Specifically, democratic regimes accommodate fewer immigrants than autocracies and democracies enable emigration while autocracies prevent exit. The mechanisms for this divergence are a function of both micro-level motivations of migrants and institutional constraints on political leaders. Global bilateral migration data and a statistical method that captures the higher-order dependencies in network data are employed in this article.
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This article develops and tests a specific model of the role of diffusion as a determinant of the magnitude and direction of regime change, using a database covering the world from 1972 to 1996. The authors find that countries tend to change their regimes to match the average degree of democracy or nondemocracy found among their contiguous neighbors and that countries in the U.S. sphere of influence tended to become more democratic in the period examined. They also confirm that countries tend to follow the direction in which the majority of other countries in the world are moving. Their model builds on several findings in the diffusion literature but adds methodological improvements and includes more extensive controls for other variables that have been found to affect regime change—including levels of development, presidentialism, and regional differences—offering further support for some and challenging other findings of the regime change literature.
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Despite the fact that the majority of emigration today originates in the global south, most research has focused on the receiving states of Europe and North America, while very little attention has been paid to the policies of the sending states toward emigration or toward their nationals abroad. Taking the country cases of Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon and Jordan, this work explores the relationship between the government of the sending states, the outmovement of their citizens and the communities of expatriates that have developed. By focusing on the evolution of government institutions charged with various aspects of expatriate affairs, this work breaks new ground in understanding the changing nature of the relationship between expatriates and their home state. Far from suggesting that the state is waning in importance, the conclusions indicate that this relationship provides evidence both of state resilience and of new trends in the practice of sovereignty.
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Many studies highlight the macro-level dissemination of global culture and institutions. This article focuses on social remittances – a local-level, migration-driven form of cultural diffusion. Social remittances are the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sending-country communities. The role that these resources play in promoting immigrant entrepreneurship, community and family formation, and political integration is widely acknowledged. This article specifies how these same ideas and practices are remolded in receiving countries, the mechanisms by which they are sent back to sending communities, and the role they play in transforming sending-country social and political life.
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On October 11, 2004, the foreign ministers of the European Union met and agreed to lift all remaining sanctions on one-time international pariah state, Libya. This broad array of sanctions, which included a comprehensive arms embargo, had been in place since the 1980s following several high-profi le Libyan-sponsored terrorist attacks within Western Europe. What catalyzed this dramatic shift in EU policy? Although relations between Libya and the European Union had been improving for some time, it was neither the Libyan decision to disband its weapons of mass destruction program nor its public repudiation of terrorism nor even its acceptance of responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that was ultimately decisive.1 Instead, sanctions were lifted in exchange for a Libyan promise to help staunch a growing fl ow of North African migrants and asylum seekers across the Mediterranean and on to European soil. The prime instrument of infl uence? Not bullets or bombs, but human beings. Simply put, European fears of unfettered migration permitted Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi to engage in a successful, if rather unconventional, form of coercion against the world's largest political and economic union-a form of coercion predicated on the intentional creation, manipulation, and exploitation of migration and refugee crises.
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By raising household income, remittances lower the marginal utility of targeted electoral transfers, thus weakening the efficacy of vote buying. Yet, remittances make individuals wealthier and believe the national economy is performing well, which is positively attributed to the incumbent. Building on these insights, I show that the confluence of these divergent channels generate a surprising result that at increasingly higher levels of dissatisfaction with the incumbent, a remittance recipient is more likely to vote for the incumbent than a non-remittance recipient. These predictions and their underlying mechanisms are substantiated across 18 Latin American countries.
Book
Exporting Japan examines the domestic origins of the Japanese government's policies to promote the emigration of approximately three hundred thousand native Japanese citizens to Latin America between the 1890s and the 1960s. This imperialist policy, spanning two world wars and encompassing both the pre-World War II authoritarian government and the postwar conservative regime, reveals strategic efforts by the Japanese state to control its populace while building an expansive nation beyond its territorial borders. Toake Endoh compellingly argues that Japan's emigration policy embodied the state's anxieties over domestic political stability and its intention to remove marginalized and radicalized social groups by relocating them abroad. Documenting the disproportionate focus of the southwest region of Japan as a source of emigrants, Endoh considers the state's motivations in formulating emigration policies that selected certain elements of the Japanese population for "export." She also recounts the situations migrants encountered once they reached Latin America, where they were often met with distrust and violence in the "yellow scare" of the pre-World War II period. © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.
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This article surveys the economic consequences of international migration on sending countries. It first provides a broad overview of recent research on migration and development, beginning with the sizes of the emigrant/immigrant stocks and the possibilities for migration-related income gains, both direct migration-related impacts and the resulting remittance flows. Recent advances have led to a reassessment of the effects of migration on development, often leading to a more sanguine view compared to earlier work on the "brain drain." However, the state of knowledge is still too rudimentary to identify when migration is beneficial for development. This uncertainty is particularly pronounced for skilled migration, which is increasingly the object of rich-country policies.
Article
Remittances are a significant source of foreign exchange for developing economies. I argue that remittances, due to their compensation and insurance functions, will increase the general income level and economic security of recipients, thereby reducing their perceived income risk. Over time, this will dampen demand from recipients for government taxation and social insurance. Therefore, I expect increases in income remitted to an economy to result in reduced levels of social welfare transfers at the macro-level. This dynamic can help us to understand spending patterns in developing democracies, and the absence of demand for social security transfers in countries with high levels of inequality and economic insecurity. I test this argument with a sample of 18 Latin American states, over the period 1990 to 2009, and subject the central causal mechanism to a battery of statistical tests. The results of these tests provide strong support for this argument.
Article
International migration is an important determinant of institutions, not considered so far in the development literature. Using cross-sectional and panel estimation for a large sample of developing countries, we find that openness to emigration (as measured by the natives’ average emigration rate) has a positive effect on home-country institutional development (as measured by standard democracy indices). The results are robust to a wide range of specifications and identification methods. Remarkably, the cross-sectional estimates are fully in line with the implied long-run relationship from dynamic panel regressions.
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While policy makers, international organizations, and academics are increasingly aware of the economic effects of emigration, the potential political effects remain understudied. This book maps the nature of the relationship that links emigration and political development. Jonathon W. Moses explores the nature of political development, arguing that emigration influences political development. In particular, he introduces a new cross-national database of annual emigration rates and analyzes specific cases of international emigration (and out-migration within countries) under varying political and economic contexts.
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Allowing or restricting foreign movement is a crucial policy choice for leaders. We argue that freedom of foreign movement reduces the level of civil unrest under non-democratic regimes, but only in some circumstances. Our argument relies on the trade-offs inherent in exit and voice as distinct strategies for dealing with a corrupt and oppressive state. By permitting exit and thereby lowering its relative costs, authoritarians can make protest and other modes of expressing dissatisfaction less attractive for potential troublemakers. Liberalizing foreign movement can thus function as a safety valve for releasing domestic pressure. But the degree to which allowing emigration is an effective regime strategy is shaped by the economic opportunities offered by countries receiving immigrants. We find that freedom of foreign movement and the existence of economic opportunities abroad reduce civil unrest in non-democratic states. However, at high levels of unemployment in the developed world, greater freedom of foreign movement actually increases protest.
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This book is the first comprehensive study of foreign direct investment (FDI) liberalization. Political economy FDI research has long focused on how host-country politics influence the supply of FDI, or how firms choose to invest. By contrast, this book focuses on the politics of FDI demand: the sources of citizens' preferences for FDI inflows and countries' foreign ownership restrictions. Professor Sonal S. Pandya's theory of FDI regulation identifies how FDI redistributes income within host countries, raises local wages, and creates competition for local firms. Policy makers regulate FDI inflows to facilitate local firms' access to these highly productive assets and the income they generate. Empirical tests also emphasize the central role of multinational cooperations' productive assets in shaping the politics of FDI. These tests feature an original dataset of annual country-industry foreign ownership regulations that spans more than one hundred countries during the period 1970–2000, the first dataset of FDI regulation of this detail and scope. This book highlights the economic and political foundations of global economic integration and supplies the tools to understand the growing economic conflicts between advanced economics and large emerging markets such as China and India.
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When it comes to linkages between migration and the global allocation of foreign development assistance, the size of the immigrant population from a recipient country residing in a donor country is an important determinant of dyadic aid commitments. Two complementary hypotheses probe this relationship. First, donors use foreign aid to achieve their broader immigration goals, targeting migrant-sending areas to increase development and decrease the demand for entry into the donor country. Second, migrants already residing in the donor country mobilize to lobby for additional aid for their homeland. Empirical tests on a large sample of country pairs made up of twenty-two donors and more than 150 recipients over the period 1993 to 2008 show robust support for these hypotheses.
Article
This article updates and describes a widely used data set on democracy. Covering 1800-2007 and 219 countries, it represents the most comprehensive dichotomous measure of democracy currently available. We argue that our measure's distinguishing features-a concrete, dichotomous coding and a long time span-are of critical value to empirical work on democracy. Inspired by Robert Dahl, we define a country as democratic if it satisfies conditions for both contestation and participation. Specifically, democracies feature political leaders chosen through free and fair elections and satisfy a threshold value of suffrage. After comparing our coding to that of other popular measures, we illustrate how democracy's predictive factors have evolved since 1800. In particular, we show that economic modernization variables have steadily declined in their correlation with democracy over time.
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What are the political consequences of international migration on the migrant's country of origin? To help understand this question, this review article first examines data and measurement issues that have hampered empirical analysis. It then lays out an analytical framework outlining four channels through which migration's political consequences play out: the prospective, absence, diaspora, and return channels. The article next delineates the variables that attenuate or amplify these effects and argues that unobservable characteristics, in particular who leaves and why, have an important influence on the type and intensity of political effects. Subsequently, the article examines some key political consequences of international migration: its political economy consequences; its impact on conflict; and its institutional effects, focusing on political institutions as well as nationalism and citizenship. The penultimate section points out the importance of temporality in understanding the political effects of international migration. The article concludes with some questions for future research.
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Why do some authoritarian regimes topple during financial crises, while others steer through financial crises relatively unscathed? In this book, Thomas B. Pepinsky uses the experiences of Indonesia and Malaysia and the analytical tools of open economy macroeconomics to answer this question. Focusing on the economic interests of authoritarian regimes’ supporters, Pepinsky shows that differences in cross-border asset specificity produce dramatically different outcomes in regimes facing financial crises. When asset specificity divides supporters, as in Indonesia, they desire mutually incompatible adjustment policies, yielding incoherent adjustment policy followed by regime collapse. When coalitions are not divided by asset specificity, as in Malaysia, regimes adopt radical adjustment measures that enable them to survive financial crises. Combining rich qualitative evidence from Southeast Asia with cross-national time-series data and comparative case studies of Latin American autocracies, Pepinsky reveals the power of coalitions and capital mobility to explain how financial crises produce regime change. © Thomas B. Pepinsky 2009 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Article
Civil wars reflect, in part, internal contestation over the provision of resources. A government's ability to buy off rebellion by providing social welfare payments is one mechanism to help ensure social stability. In times of economic distress, however, the government becomes increasingly constrained in its ability to provide social welfare and, absent some form of financial relief, will be subject to increasing pressure from potential rebel groups. Migrant remittances can serve as a smoothing mechanism that provides for social welfare needs outside the formal mechanisms of the state, and therefore acts to reduce the incentive for rebellion. We develop a model of migrant remittances as a vehicle that provides domestic stability in times of economic constraints. We test hypotheses from this model on World Bank remittance data to 152 countries from 1980 to 2005. Our results suggest that a significant increase in migrant remittances during crises can lower the risk of civil war.
Article
This essay explores how Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans learn about politics, and specifically, their notions of democracy, using a comprehensive cross-national survey funded by the Hewlett Foundation. It identifies significant differences and similarities across groups, and raises important questions about the socialization process, about the resistance of certain attitudes to transformation in new cultural settings, and the ease with which major political views are altered within months of changing national residence. Language facility proves to be a significant variable in this process. Este ensayo explora cómo los estadounidenses, los mexicano-americanos y los mexicanos aprenden sobre la política y, específicamente, investiga las nociones de democracia, a través de una encuesta comprensiva y nacional patrocinada por la Hewlett Foundation. Se identifican diferencias y similitudes significativas en los grupos y se plantean preguntas importantes sobre el proceso de socialización, sobre la resistencia de ciertas actitudes a la transformación en nuevos formatos culturales, y sobre la facilidad con que algunas visiones políticas principales son alteradas a sólo meses de haber cambiado de residencia de país. La facilidad de la lengua demuestra ser una variable significativo en este proceso.
Article
Do remittances stabilize autocracies? Remittances—money sent by foreign workers to individuals in their home country—differ from other sources of external non-tax revenue, such as foreign aid, because they accrue directly to individuals and thus raise the incomes of households. We argue that remittances increase the likelihood of democratic transition by undermining electoral support for autocratic incumbents in party-based regimes. Remittances therefore make voters less dependent on state transfers. As a result, autocracies that rely heavily on the broad-based distribution of spoils for their survival, namely party-based regimes, should prove especially vulnerable to increases in remittances. Evidence consistent with this argument suggests that remittances promote democratization in some dictatorships.
Article
Since the end of World War II, the world has seen increased cooperation in most aspects of economic life. Yet, migration remains an area that is largely regulated at the state level. Coop-eration on migration is hard to achieve for two reasons. First, immigration is a highly sensitive issue and states that receive immigrants are unlikely to be willing to delegate authority over any aspect of immigration to another agent. Second, receiving states are powerful actors in the international system. Therefore, there is no power which can push them towards cooperation. Nonetheless, there has been important cooperation on migration — most notable the guest-worker programs in Europe after World War II and resurgent guestworker programs in Europe and East Asia today. I argue that cooperation on migration is possible when the sending state is willing to pay some of the costs of regulating migration. Sending states receive the benefits of increased immigration through decreased unemployment and increased remittances. When the costs of regulating migration are high — due to the receiving state's desire to take in many semi-and high-skill workers — receiving states turn to the sending state to provide their expertise and share the costs of screening migrants. To prevent shirking, receiving states choose developed sending states as treaty partners as these states are more likely to have pools of unemployed semi-and high-skilled workers. Using a new dataset on bilateral labor migration treaties, I find support for my argument and little support for arguments in the literature, such as issue linkage and credible commitments. Finally, I argue that these treaties can help shed light on other cooperation problems where one side creates an externality for a weaker negotiating partner.
Article
This piece combines parts of Chapter 1 (Introduction) with Chapter 2 (theoretical framework) of an early draft of our book manuscript. The chapters that will eventually follow cover each of five regions: the Americas, Central Europe, former Soviet Union, East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Conventional wisdom holds that autocracies are more likely than democracies to adopt interventionist and protectionist economic policies, including fixed and undervalued exchange rates. This article suggests that this view is only partially correct: nondemocracies are a heterogeneous grouping, and only some types of authoritarian regimes adopt different foreign economic policies from those of their democratic counterparts. Using the example of exchange rate policy, the authors show that foreign economic policy varies across monarchic, military, and civilian dictatorships. More specifically, they hypothesize that monarchies and military regimes are more likely than democracies and civilian dictatorships to maintain fixed exchange rate regimes because the former regimes have smaller “selectorates” than the latter. The authors also expect that monarchies and civilian dictatorships maintain more undervalued exchange rates than democracies and military regimes because the former regimes provide their leaders with greater tenure security than the latter regimes. These hypotheses are evaluated using a time-series–cross-sectional data set of a large sample of developing countries from 1973 to 2006. The statistical results accord with these predictions. These findings indicate that the ways in which democracies engage with the global economy may be less unique than many believe.
Book
Employing analytical tools borrowed from game theory, Carles Boix offers a complete theory of political transitions. It is one in which political regimes ultimately depend on the nature of economic assets, their distribution among individuals, and the balance of power among different social groups. Backed by detailed historical research and extensive statistical analysis from the mid-nineteenth century, the study reveals why democracy emerged in classical Athens. It also covers the early triumph of democracy in nineteenth-century agrarian Norway, Switzerland and northeastern America as well as its failure in countries with a powerful landowning class.
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This paper explores the link between return migration and political outcomes in the origin country, using the case study of Mali. We use electoral and census data at the locality level to investigate the role of return migration on participation rates and electoral competitiveness. First, we run OLS and IV estimations for the 2009 municipal election, controlling for current emigration and using historical and distance variables as instruments for return migration and current emigration. Second, we build a panel dataset combining the 1998 and 2009 censuses and the electoral results for the municipal ballots of those two years to control for the potential time-invariant unobservable characteristics of the localities. We find a positive impact of the stock of return migrants on participation rates and on electoral competitiveness, which mainly stems from returnees from non-African countries. Finally, we show that the impact of returnees on turnout goes beyond their own participation, and that they affect more electoral outcomes in areas where non-migrants are poorly educated, which we interpret as evidence of a diffusion of political norms from returnees to non-migrants.
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The migration policies of the former Soviet Union (or USSR) included a virtual abolition of emigration and immigration, an effective ban on private travel abroad, and pervasive bureaucratic controls on internal migration. This article outlines this Soviet package of migration controls and assesses its historical and international distinctiveness through comparison with a liberal state, the United States, and an authoritarian capitalist state, Apartheid South Africa. Soviet limitations on external migration were more restrictive than those of contemporary capitalist states, and Soviet regulation of internal migration was unusual in its direct bureaucratic supervision of the individual. However, Soviet policy did not aim at the suppression of internal migration, but at its complete regularization. The ultimate goal was "regime adherence": the full integration of the citizen into the Soviet political order. In contrast to the USSR, migration in the contemporary world is marked by "irregularization": policies that lead to the proliferation of insecure and unauthorized migration.
Article
The revolutionary events of 1989 in Eastern Europe took a special shape in the German Democratic Republic: large-scale flights of citizens to the Federal Republic of Germany combined with increasingly powerful mass demonstrations in the major cities to bring down the communist regime. This conjunction of private emigration and public protest contrasts with the way these distinct responses to discontent had been previously experienced, primarily as alternatives. The forty-year history of the German Democratic Republic thus represents a particularly rich theater of operation for the concepts of “exit” and “voice,” which the author had introduced in his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970). The events of 1989 are scrutinized in some detail as they trace a more complex pattern of interaction than had been found to prevail in most previous studies.
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Poorly governed (e.g., repressive) countries tend to be located near other poorly governed countries, and well governed countries near other well governed countries. Researchers, by identifying country characteristics (e.g., ethnic fractionalization) that may influence government quality, have provided one potential explanation: Neighboring countries tend to be similar with respect to those characteristics. In this paper, we draw on Hirschman's notion of “exit” as a disciplining device in order to provide a different, though complementary, explanation: The ability of a ruler to implement policy that displeases the country's populace is constrained by opportunities for residents to relocate to other countries nearby. To generate testable predictions about the effects of potential exit on government quality, we develop a simple theoretical model. We test the model's predictions using cross-sectional and panel data, controlling for other determinants of government quality. The evidence we present – which includes discussion of historical examples such as ancient Greece and the Soviet Bloc – supports the model's predictions.
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Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration episode that started in the late 1990s strongly affected political preferences and electoral outcomes in Moldova during the following decade and was eventually instrumental in bringing down the last ruling Communist government in Europe. Our results are suggestive of information transmission and cultural diffusion channels. Identification relies on the quasi-experimental context studied and on the differential effects arising from the fact that emigration was directed both to more democratic Western Europe and to less democratic Russia.
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War and the extent of mass mobilization for war has a signi…cant impact on a wide variety of economic and political development outcomes. In this paper, we investigate to what extent technological change has in‡fluenced the choice by governments to …field mass armies. Focusing on a sample of thirteen great powers between 1600 and 2000 we argue that changes in transport and communications technology were the single most important factor that ushered in the era of the mass army and subsequently led to its demise. During the nineteenth century the development of the railroad made it possible for the …first time to mobilize and feed armies numbering in the millions. During the late twentieth century further advances in transport and communications technology made it possible to deliver explosive force from a distance and with precision, making mass armies less desirable. We …find strong support for our technological interpretation using a new data set that measures army size, population mobilization, and methods of recruitment from the beginning of the seventeenth century. In so doing we also consider several other plausible determinants of military mobilization. Contrary to what is often suggested by scholars, we fi…nd little evidence that the French Revolution and the invention of the concept of “"the nation in arms" ”was associated with a substantial increase in levels of mobilization across nations. Even for the French case alone, the magnitude of what is sometimes referred to as the "“Napoleonic watershed”" was smaller than what is often believed.
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We construct new series for common native language and common spoken language for 195 countries, which we use together with series for common official language and linguistic proximity in order to draw inferences about (1) the aggregate impact of all linguistic factors on bilateral trade, (2) whether the linguistic influences come from ethnicity and trust or ease of communication, and (3) in so far they come from ease of communication, to what extent translation and interpreters play a role. The results show that the impact of linguistic factors, all together, is at least twice as great as the usual dummy variable for common language, resting on official language, would say. In addition, ease of communication is far more important than ethnicity and trust. Further, so far as ease of communication is at work, translation and interpreters are extremely important. Finally, ethnicity and trust come into play largely because of immigrants and their influence is otherwise difficult to detect
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Why do many resource-rich countries maintain autocratic political regimes? The authors’ proposed answer focuses on the causal effect of labor imports, or immigration. Using the logic offered by Acemoglu and Robinson’s democratization model, the authors posit that immigration makes democratization less likely because it facilitates redistributive concessions to appease the population within an autocratic regime. This immigration argument applies directly to the political resource curse since many resource-rich countries tend to also be labor scarce, leading them to import foreign laborers. Consistent with this understanding, the authors find a statistically significant negative relationship between net immigration per capita and democratization in future periods. Their results also show that when controlling for this immigration effect, the standard resource curse variables lose significance in a democratization model. This latter result suggests that much of the so-called resource curse stems not from resource endowments per se but rather from the labor imports related to resource production.
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International migrants are agents of democratic diffusion. They spread attitudes and behaviors absorbed in democratic host countries to their less democratic home countries by way of three processes: (a) migrant returns, (b) cross-border communication between migrants still abroad and their friends and family back home, and (c) migrant information networks in high-volume migration-producing communities. Marshaling data from an original June 2006 national survey in Mexico, the authors show that through one or another of these processes, migration alters the political participation and behavior of Mexicans living in Mexico.
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The literature on democracy suggests that new democracies should have difficulty emerging during war or in the aftermath of armed struggle, yet Portugal's current democracy emerged simultaneously with the end of the nation's unsuccessful war in Africa. This article addresses the reasons and argues that democracy triumphed not simply in spite of the war but also, in part, because of it. The costs and geography of the war itself, the capacity and rootedness of the state that waged the war, the political culture of the regime's military officers, and the war-related timing of Portugal's first elections all helped prevent the emergence of an anti-democratic coalition and contributed to ensuring a successful transition to democracy. The article ends with three ideas that merit closer examination: that different sorts of wars leave different legacies for democracy; that wars that leave state bureaucracies intact or stronger are more likely to be followed by lasting democracy than those which do not; and, finally, that the ideologies of military elites are pivotal to the outcome of post-war democratic transitions.
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Expulsion of a Minority: essays on Ugandan Asians edited by TwaddleMichaelLondon, Athlone Press, 1975. Pp. 240. £4.50. - Volume 14 Issue 2 - Vali Jamal
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In this overview of a new database and approach to measuring distance among historical and contemporary independent nation-states, we review the utility of space to theory and empirical research in international studies. We identify weaknesses in existing empirical data on distances and contiguity among nations. Categorical data on distance treat proximity as an either-or issue and do not permit identifying degree of proximity among states. Continuous measures of distances between midpoints, such as capital cities, often overstate the actual distances between state borders and suffer for large states and irregular territories. We outline a new alternative approach, based on measuring the minimum distance for pairs of polities in the international system, which remedies some of these shortcomings. The current implementation of the minimum-distance database includes the minimum distances for all polities within 950 km of each other from 1875 to the present. We demonstrate the enhanced flexibility of the new minimum-distance approach relative to existing alternatives. Moreover, we illustrate how variables constructed from distance measures, combined with spatial statistical techniques, can contribute substantively to international relations and cross-national comparative research. We demonstrate the importance of dependence among geographical neighbors by examining the link between levels of economic wealth and prospects for democracy in the context of regional interdependence among states.