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Unpacking the Diaspora Channel in New Democracies: When Do Migrants Act Politically Back Home?

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Abstract

Migrant influence on politics back home has arguably become broader and deeper in the wake of a widespread convergence between out-migration and democratization. This article seeks to identify the structural conditions under which migrants from post-1980 democracies are likely to activate the “diaspora channel” of political influence back home. Specifically, I identify, explain, and code two sets of incentives likely to induce migrants to engage in home-country politics from abroad: (1) socioeconomic incentives generated by cross-border linkages and migrant characteristics likely to predispose them toward broader forms of transnational engagement and (2) political incentives generated by diaspora politicization and formal access to the political process in the home country. I score these incentives in 40 developing countries and then generate hypotheses about the degree to which migrants from these countries are likely to activate the diaspora channel through participation in home-country elections, lobbying for policy changes by the home-country government, or transnational coproduction.

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Notes

  1. As explained in the Introduction to this volume, the diaspora channel consists of emigrants exercising influence from abroad and is one of four channels of migrant influence proposed by Kapur.

  2. In the World Bank’s classification, “South” refers to low- and middle-income countries, including a few located in northern latitudes, and “North” includes both OECD and non-OECD high-income countries, including a few located in southern latitudes.

  3. This article is part of a larger project on the patterns and implications of cross-border engagement by migrants in home-country politics.

  4. The regime scores are from the Polity IV Project, which calculates degrees of democratic and autocratic authority along a 21-point scale ranging from −10 (hereditary monarchy) to +10 (consolidated democracy), with a score of +6 considered as the threshold for a democracy (Marshall and Jaggers 2009). I have kept Ecuador in the sample despite its 2010 score of +5 because I disagree that it has made a full transition back to authoritarianism. Mali also remains in the sample despite its 2012 coup, which appears to have been a brief interlude in a relatively long period of democratic rule. At the same time, I have excluded Comoros and Guinea-Bissau even though they meet the minimum polity threshold because they were classified as “authoritarian” by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2010.

  5. Coproduction refers to the provision of goods and services by private as well as public actors (Ostrom 1996; see, also, Duquette, this volume). Although it often implies collaboration, I am including any investments made by both actors (e.g., in public goods) regardless of whether they engaged in explicit task-sharing.

  6. Unless otherwise indicated, I am using “activation of the diaspora channel” to refer to political activities, setting aside the other kinds of migrant engagement covered by the Kapur framework, such as investment, entrepreneurship, or cultural exchange. For a fascinating discussion of how diaspora investment might be motivated by the desire to influence politics back home, thereby transforming my dependent variable into an independent variable, see Riddle and Nielsen (2012).

  7. Unless otherwise indicated, the country scores for each variable are an unweighted average of its component indicators.

  8. For an excellent survey of the vast literature on migrant transnationalism, see Vertovec (2004).

  9. I therefore exclude Chile, Mexico, and Turkey from my OECD-based indicators.

  10. This is not to say that female migrants are any less susceptible to feeling excluded and marginalized in the host countries, particularly if they are undocumented.

  11. The United Nations has global gender data (UNDP 2009), but it is so inconsistent with the OECD data that I have chosen not to use it.

  12. The low scores for Lesotho reflect a very high naturalization rate (93.1 %) in the OECD. It is worth noting, however, that fewer than 1 % of Lesotho’s emigrants live in OECD countries.

  13. In fact, my cases show a strong negative correlation between education-based partial integration and the share of migrants with at least 10 years in the host country (R 2 = −0.84).

  14. My cases show a strong inverse correlation between duration-based partial integration and post-primary education (R 2 = −0.69).

  15. Several scholars note the importance of “socially expected duration” whereby migrants internalize the expectations of family and friends regarding the length of their stay (see, e.g., Guarnizo et al. 2003). Community orientation is also shaped by immigration policy in the host country. For example, Turkey’s high score for partial integration is linked to the longstanding exclusion of Turkish immigrants from citizenship in Germany, where 70 % of them reside. Until reforming its nationality law in 1999, Germany adhered to the principle of jus sanguinis, whereby citizenship was restricted to people of German descent.

  16. See “Appendix 4” for specific coding strategies.

  17. There have been political refugees from nearly all of the 40 countries, but I am only giving positive scores to those in which the political motivations for emigration clearly outweighed the economic ones, at least for a significant subset of migrants. I am also excluding countries such as Nepal and Peru where most displaced people from the conflict zones moved elsewhere in the same country.

  18. The Macedonian case is complicated by the contested borders and pan-national ethnic identities in the region. For example, the Greek Civil War produced many Macedonian refugees, but they were not fleeing the state of Macedonia. In fact, while some fled to OECD countries, many crossed the border into what was then Yugoslavia and is now officially the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. For an excellent analysis of the Macedonia Question, see Danforth (1997).

  19. Ecuador and Guatemala are also sharply divided along ethnic lines, but I have excluded them because of the weak links between identity and partisanship at the national level. Ecuador does have ethnic parties, but they tend to be highly personalistic and easily marginalized.

  20. The legislation that established expatriate voting rights in Mexico included a prohibition against presidential campaigning outside the country. In practice, however, candidates find other reasons to distribute propaganda and visit the migrant community in the USA during campaign season. Following the coding strategy outlined in “Appendix 4,” I therefore give Mexico a partial score of 0.5 on this indicator.

  21. The failure of implementation is most glaring in Ghana, where migrants remain disenfranchised despite passage of favorable legislation in 2006, but it may also prove daunting in Lebanon and Sierra Leone. By contrast, the prospects for overseas voting appear relatively favorable for the next elections in Turkey, which are currently scheduled to take place in August 2014.

  22. In the remaining countries with expatriate voting, the right to vote from abroad was granted in a top-down fashion, either during the country’s democratic transition or to consolidate a new governing coalition, with little to no migrant mobilization.

  23. For example, the campaign for expatriate voting rights in Mexico contributed to the emergence of new leaders, organizations, and networks (Lieber 2010; Smith and Bakker 2008). Even after achieving their initial goal, many of these same actors have lobbied the Mexican government for other reforms, such as fewer restrictions on voter registration and the creation of a cabinet position for migrant affairs.

  24. To be consistent with the categorical coding used for the other political incentives, I score this indicator as full, partial, and none based on terciles within the sample range. I recognize that drinking water and sanitation are not necessarily public goods, but coverage rates can still serve as a reasonable proxy for the government’s commitment to providing public services. Because of missing data for 2011, I am using 2000 figures for sanitation in Latvia and Lebanon and for drinking water and sanitation in Paraguay and Romania. Since Latvia and Romania have since gained access to resources linked to membership in the European Union, their figures are likely to be inflated.

  25. The only post-communist countries affected by this adjustment are Albania, Moldova, and Romania, whose scores fall from partial to none.

  26. Senegal had a cabinet-level ministry dedicated exclusively to the diaspora until 2012, when a new administration merged it into a hybrid Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Senegalese in the Diaspora (Africa Review, 24 September 2013).

  27. In the Mexican case, I am counting the National Network of State Offices of Attention to Migrants (Conofam), which acts as an umbrella organization for state-level offices of diaspora outreach in 29 of Mexico’s 32 states.

  28. The most notable examples are migrant representation on the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2006 to 2009 (Young and Park 2009) and the creation of a Diaspora Advisory Board by the Liberian Embassy in Washington, DC in 2009 to consult the government on its Poverty Reduction Strategy (Moniba 2009).

  29. The only advisory councils with unelected representatives are the Consultative Committees to the Presidency of Dominicans Abroad (CCPDE), whose members are appointed by the president, and the Supreme Council of Senegalese Abroad (CSSE), which has a mix of elected and appointed members. It should be noted, however, that even the elected councils are often highly politicized and tend to be chosen by a very small minority of the migrant community.

  30. I give a partial score to Kenya because only migrants living in the East African Community were allowed to vote from abroad in the 2013 elections, thereby excluding the sizable communities of Kenyan migrants living in OECD countries (“Kenyan Elections 2013: Only 960 Kenyans Register to Vote in Uganda” 2013).

  31. Senegal also reserved four seats for migrants in its newly created Senate in 2007, but they were directly nominated by the president rather than elected, and the Senate was disbanded entirely in 2012 (“Senegal Gets Rid of Its Senate to Save Money” 2012; Whitaker 2011, p. 766).

  32. Several studies find a weak relationship between voting and gender in US and European elections when controlling for socioeconomic status (see, e.g., Schlozman et al. 1994). The same result is possible with regard to home-country elections, but I suspect that non-economic factors such as culture and status create a stronger gender bias in overseas voting, largely because female migrants are likely to have fewer status-based incentives to participate in electoral politics back home, particularly if they come from traditional societies.

  33. Another factor that is likely to have a major impact on voter turnout, but is beyond the scope of this article, is the extent to which the home country’s voting rules and infrastructure facilitate (or obstruct) electoral participation (see, e.g., Chelius 2003; Lafleur 2013; Lieber 2010).

  34. A notable exception that proves the rule is the high turnout among Latvian migrants to vote in a 2012 referendum to determine whether Russian should become Latvia’s second official language. Actively encouraged by Latvian diaspora organizations, nearly 40,000 Latvians cast ballots from abroad, an almost three-fold increase over the number of overseas votes in the parliamentary elections just 1 year before (Corcoran 2013). These outcomes are consistent with Latvia’s combination of weak party outreach and cleavage-based partisanship.

  35. As with all of my indicators, there are notable exceptions that reflect a more complicated reality. For example, migrant organizations are arguably stronger and more prevalent in Argentina and Hong Kong than in Japan (see, e.g., Grismon and Paz Soldán 2000; Pizarro 2009; Rother 2009; Yamanaka 2010).

  36. Organized migrants are also increasingly involved in promoting business development and job creation back home. Although this form of engagement is important and may affect home-country politics, I am not treating it as transnational coproduction because of its emphasis on private rather than public goods.

  37. A notable exception is investment in churches, mosques, or other religious projects, but I am excluding these from transnational coproduction because they are not publicly funded in most countries.

  38. The most prominent example is Mexico’s Three-for-One Program, which provides matching grants to migrant organizations with qualifying local projects (Fernandez de Castro et al. 2006; Duquette, this volume).

  39. For example, OECD-based migrants from Liberia are quite well-organized and have invested in education, health, agriculture, and resettlement projects back home (Stephen Lubkemann 2008; Stevens 2007; Young and Park 2009), but they represent only 20 % of all Liberian migrants.

  40. Given the prevalence of temporary labor migration, the return channel may be of greater importance than the diaspora channel to politics in the Philippines.

  41. It would be possible—and desirable—to construct a multi-point scale for these indicators, but such an endeavour requires additional research that is beyond the scope of this article.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank her research assistants for their invaluable help, as well as Joy Langston, Deepak Lamba-Nieves, Covadonga Meseguer, and the reviewers for their detailed comments on earlier drafts, which were presented at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City and the Transnational Studies Initiative at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

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Correspondence to Katrina Burgess.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 6 Socioeconomic incentives for diaspora channel activation

Appendix 2

Table 7 Political incentives for diaspora channel activation

Appendix 3

Table 8 Indicators, coding strategies, and sources for socioeconomic incentives

Appendix 4

Table 9 Indicators, coding strategies, and sources for political incentives

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Burgess, K. Unpacking the Diaspora Channel in New Democracies: When Do Migrants Act Politically Back Home?. St Comp Int Dev 49, 13–43 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-014-9151-5

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