Migrants' Remittances and Home Country Elections: Cross-National and Subnational Evidence

St Comp Int Dev (2014) 49:4466

DOI 10.1007/s12116-014-9148-0

Benjamin Nyblade & Angela OMahony

Published online: 6 March 2014# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract Elections in developing countries have increasingly become international events. Previous scholarship identifies many examples in which migrants from developing countries have played a role in financing elections in their home countries and provides cross-national evidence that migrants increase remittances in election years. However, previous cross-national analyses have been limited by their reliance on annual national-level data. This article provides statistical analyses of quarterly subnational data of remittance inflows to Mexican states and new monthly national-level data on remittance inflows for nine countries. These analyses demonstrate that political remittance cycles appear in the quarter prior to an election, can exist both for national and subnational elections, and are influenced by both economic conditions in migrants host countries and political conditions in their home countries.

Keywords Remittances . Elections . Migration

Introduction

With more than 200 million people living outside their country of origin, migrants and migrant groups have become powerful political actors, both in their host and home countries (stergaard-Nielsen 2003). Migration may have both direct and indirect effects on politics: migrants may not only involve themselves directly in politics, but the mere prospect of migration, as well as the absence or return of certain migrants can have major political repercussions (Kapur 2010). However, systematically examining migrants political involvement in their home country has proven quite difficult, as the

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B. Nyblade (*)

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

A. OMahony

RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

Migrants Remittances and Home Country Elections: Cross-National and Subnational Evidence

St Comp Int Dev (2014) 49:4466 45

mechanisms through which migrant political involvement occurs are often undocumented and unregulated.

While much of migrants political involvement remains difficult to systematically assess, increased efforts by international organizations and home countries to engage migrants as potential partners in the economic development of their home countries has resulted in greater efforts to systematically track and analyze migrants financial remittances (World Bank 2011). This has allowed scholars to study migrants political remittances...