Go West, Young Man
Traveling, goes the saying, broadens the mind. And, as it turns out, it now may also influence politics in the home country. It has long been known that letting “undesirables” go strengthens a country’s ruling clique, by exporting dissent. The strategy has been followed, among others, by Cuba and, earlier, the German Democratic Republic. In the latter case, the fact that many potential opponents had left the country helped to strengthen the repressive regime.
But less known is the fact that emigrants can help give the boot to the home-country government — and not only as returnees casting their vote. CESifo member Christoph Trebesch and his colleagues Toman Omar Mahmoud, Hillel Rapoport and Andreas Steinmayr analyse how and why this happens in a highly readable CESifo Working Paper released this month. It is the first study to document destination-specific political spillovers on real political outcomes in the home country.
In a 1970 treatise, Albert O. Hirschman famously encapsulated the options open to members of an organisation, be it a company or a country, as Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: one can exit the troubled institution, openly voice his grievance, or remain loyal to it and support it without voicing any public criticism. In the days when migrants had only limited options for interacting with their home country, the first two options tended to be mutually exclusive: the more people exited, the less voice remained against the regime. That was the feature exploited by the countries mentioned above.
But with today’s internet, facility of communication and ease of travelling, contact with the home country is much more intensive. And that, our researchers have found out, changes the picture.
Specifically, emigration creates political spillovers from migrants’ destination to their home countries, spillovers which vary with the socio-political regime of the destination country. Exposure to unfiltered information, alternative political institutions and the economic systems of more democratic countries changes the migrants’ perspective, the new information and norms likely to spill over to their home communities – even to families without any migrant.
To test this idea, the authors tried to empirically identify destination-specific spillover effects of economically driven emigration on the electoral and political preferences of those who stay behind. In particular, they tested whether municipalities in less-democratic countries that send migrants to democratic and advanced nations experience an increase in political support for more democratic and liberal parties in elections.
They decided to base their analysis on the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, since it provides ideal conditions to test such effects. During Soviet times, Moldova was virtually cut off from the rest of the world and had little exposure through migration, travel, media, or books. It became an independent democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union; its Communist Party was initially banned, but regained power in 2001. In 2009, however, a parliamentary election saw a pro-Western coalition come to power, leading to the demise of the Communist government and to a rapid improvement in civil liberties and press freedom, and to the initiation of economic and political reforms. The authors investigate whether emigration to Western Europe contributed to this historical turning point.
Emigration from Moldova provides a quasi-experimental setting. There had been practically no emigration before the Russian financial crisis of 1998. That crisis shattered Moldova’s economy, prompting a large fraction of the population to pack their bags. About 40% of emigrants headed for the European Union, the rest to the east, overwhelmingly to Russia. Using data from the population census and official election results, the authors test whether communities with migrants to the West changed their electoral preferences and voted less for the Communist Party and, conversely, whether those with migrants headed for Russia increased their Communist vote.
They find a strong and robust effect of migration patterns on political outcomes. Communities with migration flows to the West see a change in electoral preferences away from the Communist Party and towards pro-European, reformist parties. In contrast, those with flows to the East, mostly Russia, see an increased electoral support for the Communist Party. Their findings hold even after controlling for many other factors that could account for them, such as political self-selection (i.e., liberal-minded people heading to the West and more statist ones heading to Russia), proximity to borders and so on.
Specifically, they find that emigration of one percent of a community’s population to the West reduces the Communist vote share by 0.6 percentage points, more than offsetting the loss of likely opposition votes through emigration. (It is worth mentioning that they counted only the votes of those left behind, leaving out those votes of emigrants who stayed abroad.)
The magnitude of the effect is so large that it was decisive in bringing an end to the reign of the last ruling Communist Party in Europe, twenty years after the Berlin Wall came down.
In fact, if all emigrants to the West are assumed to be opposition voters who, on account of their absence could not cast their vote, one percentage more emigration to the West would reduce the Communist vote share among those who stay behind by 1.1 percentage points. A counterfactual analysis shows that if no Moldovans had left for the West and voted as the average stayer, the Communist party would have gained two percentage points, and if all had migrated to the East, the Communist Party would have gained three percentage points – and there would have been no change in government.
So, the effect is clear. As to how it comes about, the authors provide suggestive evidence that it works through the diffusion of information and norms from abroad, as indicated by individual-level data from several political opinion polls conducted between 2002 and 2009 and from an exit poll with a migration module that the authors commissioned for this study in 2010.
In short, they provide solid evidence that even indirect exposure (through contacts with migrants) to new social norms and information can trigger significant changes in attitudes back home, thus creating important externalities of migration.
Thus, they suggest, to the extent that migrants can retain close ties with their home communities, exit and voice cease to be mutually exclusive and can indeed be complementary in bringing about political changes, jointly contributing to the global diffusion of democracy.
Toman Omar Mahmoud, Hillel Rapoport, Andreas Steinmayr and Christoph Trebesch: "The Effect of Labor Migration on the Diffusion of Democracy: Evidence from a Former Soviet Republic", CESifo Working Paper No. 4389