Remittances and Protest in Dictatorships

Abstract

Remittances-money migrant workers send back home-are the second largest source of international financial flows in developing countries. As with other sources of international finance, such as foreign direct investment and foreign aid, worker remittances shape politics in recipient countries. We examine the political consequences of remittances by exploring how they influence antigovernment protest behavior. While recent research argues that remittances have a pernicious effect on politics by contributing to authoritarian stability, we argue the opposite: Remittances increase political protest in nondemocracies by augmenting the resources available to potential political opponents. Using cross-national data on a latent measure of antigovernment political protest, we show that remittances increase protest. To explore the mechanism linking remittances to protest, we turn to individual-level data from eight nondemocracies in Africa to show that remittance receipt increases protest in opposition areas but not in progovernment regions.

Remittances and bribery in Africa

“…On the other hand, it could also lead to political disengagement. Escriba-Folch et al (2018), argue that remittances increase government revenues through higher consumption taxes and/or a reduction in the provision of public goods, as previously explained, which means that the government has more resources available for clientelism. In addition, because of the substitution effects induced by remittances, people could become less interested in politics thereby making it easier to politically manipulate them before an election (Combes et al, 2015).…”

Transnational remittances and state protection of human rights: A case for caution

“…In contrast to the substitution argument, the accountability perspective holds that remittances reduce the economic dependence of the population on the state and hence, enable it to voice a demand for political reform (Escriba‐Folch et al, ; Pfutze, , ; Tyburski, ). While this perspective typically posits a beneficial impact of remittance inflows on institutional quality, the precise implication for human rights is again ambiguous: while the increased demand for institutional reform could well increase state respect for human rights, it is also plausible that it may induce increased state repression and consequently, a greater frequency of human rights abuses (Escriba‐Folch, Meseguer, & Wright, ).…”

Theorizing state-diaspora relations in the Middle East: Authoritarian emigration states in comparative perspective

“…This strand left a gap with regard to authoritarian states' strategies (for exceptions, see: Brand, 2006;Shain, 2005;Østergaard-Nielsen, 2003). A recent wave of scholarship has addressed this by examining both how diasporas interact with authoritarian politics at home (Betts & Jones, 2016;Escriba-Folch, Meseguer, & Wright, 2018) as well as how autocratic governments develop policies to govern their populations abroad (including a special issue of Globalizations, edited by Glasius, 2017).…”