Divided island: Haitian immigration and electoral outcomes in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of immigration on electoral outcomes in developing countries and emerging democracies. The Dominican Republic is used as case study as it provides a highly interesting context to analyse this issue. The vast majority of its immigrants come from neighbouring Haiti, and together the two countries share the island of Hispaniola. The analysis relies on a novel municipality panel dataset and an instrumental variable strategy to address the endogeneity of the location decisions of immigrants. I find robust evidence that higher immigrant concentration causes greater support for the rightwing political coalition that has traditionally been more opposed to immigration. At the same time, the popularity of the centre coalition is found to decline in localities characterised by a larger exposure to foreigners. Empirical evidence from election outcomes and opinion survey data suggests that citizenship, political competition, and cultural identity considerations might be shaping individual attitudes towards immigrants in the Dominican Republic.

Effects of parental migration on the education of left-behind children

“…The research finds that boys living in migrant households benefit more than girls in terms of enrolling in school. The analysis also reveals that young females in migrant households marry earlier, and therefore leave school (Jaupart, 2018).…”

“…Despite the inclusion of the set of explanatory variables and fixed effects discussed above, the parameter on migration in Equation (1) would typically be biased or may not capture the causal effect of migration. The migration status is a choice variable by migrant households, which means that it is not exogenous to the household because time-varying characteristics might influence migration decision or labour market outcome (Dabalen & Miluka, 2010;Jaupart, 2018). However, the receipts of treatment effect may differ due to some unobservable variables.…”