Remittances, Interactions with the State and Political Accountability

• In Event: Non-state Welfare and Identity in the Global South

Abstract

Remittances, the repatriated earnings of emigrant workers, have risen spectacularly in recent decades. In fact, they have become one of the largest global money flows. As a consequence, remittances have become a key object for students of economic and political development. Yet, most existing work failed to consider remittances as dynamic, that is, changing, money flows. Yet, remittances do change; they do not always reach recipient households at the same time and in the same amounts. In this paper, we examine how these changes in remittances alter the way recipients interact with, and rely upon, their state, particularly with regard to government welfare transfers and material assistance, and how this affects demands for political accountability. By combining cross-national survey data from Central-Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia with focus group data from Kyrgyzstan, we show that recipients are less reliant on state welfare goods than non-recipients and also believe that their state should play a reduced role in key sectors of the national economy. Nonetheless, they are also more likely to interact with their state. When remittances decline, however, recipients become more dependent on state transfers and they are also more likely to seek material assistance from the state. These different interactions with the state in turn affect the willingness of recipients to hold their governments accountable.

Authors

• Catherine E. De Vries, Bocconi University

• David Doyle, University of Oxford

• Hector Solaz, University of Oxford

• Katerina Tertytchnaya, University of Oxford