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Global Migration and Political Regime Type: A Democratic Disadvantage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2012
Abstract
An indicator of globalization is the growing number of humans crossing national borders. In contrast to explanations for flows of goods and capital, migration research has concentrated on unilateral movements to rich democracies. This focus ignores the bilateral determinants of migration and stymies empirical and theoretical inquiry. The theoretical insights proposed here show how the regime type of both sending and receiving countries influences human migration. Specifically, democratic regimes accommodate fewer immigrants than autocracies and democracies enable emigration while autocracies prevent exit. The mechanisms for this divergence are a function of both micro-level motivations of migrants and institutional constraints on political leaders. Global bilateral migration data and a statistical method that captures the higher-order dependencies in network data are employed in this article.
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Footnotes
Department of Political Science, University of Toronto; Department of Political Science, Penn State University (email: xuc11@psu.edu); and Department of Political Science, State University of New York, respectively. The authors are listed in alphabetical order, and equal authorship is implied. Previous versions of the article were presented at the 2008 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association and the International Political Economy Society, and the Annual Political Networks Conference in 2010. We would like to thank John Ahlquist, David Bearce, Bela Hovy, Mark Kayser, Jeffrey Kopstein, David Leblang, Douglas Massey, Helen Milner, Phil Triadafilopoulos, Hugh Ward, Michael Ward, Anton Westveld, Erik Wibbels, two anonymous reviewers and Journal Editor Kristian Gleditsch for their helpful comments. Finally, the authors would like to thank Christopher Parsons, Ronald Skeldon, Terrie Walmsley and L. Alan Winters for assembling the migration data upon which a portion of the dataset is based. Replication files and an online appendix with more robustness checks are posted on the authors’ websites.
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