International migration as a driver of political and social change: evidence from Morocco

Abstract

This paper focuses on the impact of international migration on the transfer of political and social norms. Exploiting recent and unique data on Morocco, this paper explores whether households with return and current migrants bear different political preferences and behaviours than non-migrant families. Once controlling for the double selection into emigration and return migration, the findings suggest that having a returnee in the household increases the demand for political and social change. This result is driven by returnees mostly from Western European countries, who were exposed to more democratic norms in the destination. However, we find a negative impact of having a current migrant on the willingness of the left-behind households to change. This result is driven by migrants to non-Western countries, where the quality of political and social institutions is lower. Our results are robust to also controlling for destination selectivity.

Return migration and the transfer of gender norms: Evidence from the Middle East

“…As a further robustness check, we use an alternative exclusion restriction for the emigration selection. We construct a proxy for the attractiveness of foreign labor markets when the individual was 20 years old, following see Tuccio et al (2016). This measure of attractiveness is calculated as the relative GDP per capita growth rate of each possible destination relative to that of Jordan, weighted by the size of the diaspora in that destination, and then we use the most attractive destination for each potential migrant at age 20.…”

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

“…10 Kapur (2014) provides a recent survey of the literature. 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.…”

Network-based Connectedness and the Diffusion of Cultural Traits

“…Evidence is provided on the effect of returning migrants on gender-egalitarian attitudes(Tuccio and Wahba, 2015), on fertility behaviors(Bertoli and Marchetta, 2015) and on political norms(Chauvet and Mercier, 2014;Tuccio et al, 2019).…”