Does Emigration Delay Political Change? Evidence from Italy during the Great Recession

Abstract

Mobility within the European Union (EU) brings great opportunities and large overall benefits. Economically stagnant areas, however, may be deprived of talent through emigration, which may harm dynamism and delay political, and economic, change. A significant episode of emigration took place between 2010 and 2014 from Italy following the deep economic recession beginning in 2008 that hit most acutely countries in the southern EU. This period coincided with significant political change in Italy. Combining administrative data on Italian citizens who reside abroad and data on characteristics of city councils, city mayors and local vote, we analyze whether emigration reduced political change. The sudden emigration wave interacted with the pre-existing networks of emigration from Italian municipalities allow us to construct a proxy for emigration that is municipality-specific and independent of local political and economic trends. Using this proxy as an instrument, we find that municipalities with larger emigration rates had smaller shares of young, college educated and women among local politicians. They were also more likely to have had municipal councils dismissed due to inefficiency or corruption, a larger share of vote for status-quo-supporting parties and lower political participation. Migration was also associated with lower firm creation.

European ruling parties’ electoral strategies and overseas enfranchisement policies

“…But voting emigrants are likely to be distinctive, requiring more than mere extrapolation from domestic trends. Such distinctive traits recur in emigrants’ values, demographics and behaviour (Anelli & Peri ; Docquier et al. ; Gamlen ; Hormiga & Bolívar‐Cruz ; Mercier ).…”

Exit, Voice, and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States

“…Several papers have studied the effects of migration to more democratic countries, finding a positive effect on democratization (Spilimbergo 2009;Docquier et al 2016;Mercier 2016), political participation (Chauvet and Mercier 2014), political institutions (Beine and Sekkat 2013), demand for political and social change (Batista and Vicente 2011;Tuccio, Wahba, and Hamdouch 2016), and voting for an opposition party (Pfutze 2012;Barsbai et al 2017) and a negative effect on conflict prevalence (Preotu 2016). 11 By contrast, Anelli and Peri (2017) find that emigration during the Great Recession hampered political change in Italy. Migrant remittances have been found to affect home country political institutions in both positive and negative ways (Ahmed 2012(Ahmed , 2013Pfutze 2014;Escriba-Folch, Meseguer, and Wright 2015).…”

'Brain Gain' on Wikipedia: Immigrants Return Knowledge Home

“…Immigration literature increasingly uses global shocks to immigration to identify causal effects of interest (Borjas and Doran (2015), Ganguli (2015), Anelli and Peri (2017), and Barsbai et al (2017)).…”

“…Although for the countries of immigrants' origin the outflow of skilled individuals is often perceived as a negative phenomenon, leading to a deterioration of the knowledge economy and the quality of institutions in the origin countries (Anelli and Peri (2017), Docquier et al (2016)), recent literature on innovation suggests that immigrants can act as a channel through which their origin countries could benefit from external knowledge to a certain extent. The positive impact of immigration on knowledge spillovers to the countries of immigrants' origin has been shown for scientific publications and inventions.…”