Migrant Attitudes on Democratic Institutions and Participation

• In Event: The Political Economy of Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

Scholarship shows that migrants from less to more democratic countries adopt the democratic norms of their destination countries, returning home more supportive of democracy, more critical of home country institutions, and more willing to participate in politics. What happens, though, when migrants move to less democratic countries, as is ubiquitous in South-South migration? We argue that, unlike migrants to democracies, migrants to non-democracies experience much more nuanced effects because they face tradeoffs between democracy and other aspects of governance such as robust economic growth and effective state capacity. We investigate this claim using evidence from the first field experiment to induce overseas migration---in this case, migration from India to the Persian Gulf countries. We find that migrants held more positive views of India's democratic institutions after encountering authoritarian institutions. When forced to choose between state capacity and democracy, however, they were no more willing to value democracy. Though migrants became more interested in participating politically, they voted less due to the bureaucratic challenges of doing so overseas. These results emphasize that migrants from democratic to autocratic countries face difficult tradeoffs between democratic norms and good governance, indicating that the literature on political remittances should conceptually demarcate between various aspects of governance that are typically correlated in the study of migration to liberal, Western democracies.

Authors

• Nikhar Gaikwad, Columbia University

• Kolby Hanson, Wesleyan University

• Aliz Toth, London School of Economics