The Impact of International Migration on Democratic Accountability

Home , Northern Mariana Islands

DOES MOBILITY MAKE BAD CITIZENS? THE IMPACT OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION ON DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulﬁllment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of

Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Yoon-Ah Oh, B.A./M.A.

Graduate Program in Political Science

The Ohio State University

2011

Dissertation Committee:

Irfan Nooruddin, Advisor

Marcus Kurtz

Jeremy Wallace ABSTRACT

The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in international migration and attendant remittance ﬂows across borders. Recent scholarship suggests that remittance wealth and mobility opportunities made available by migration may empower citizens and lead to social transformations in the country of origin. This increasingly popular view holds that the political autonomy created by remittances and democratic attitudes transmitted through diaspora networks changes political relationships in developing countries in favor of ordinary citizens. However, whether international mobility indeed promotes democracy is subject to dispute in both theoretical and empirical terms.

This dissertation explores how international migration affects citizens’ demand for government accountability in origin countries. The availability of exit and migration- generated remittance inflows creates a possibility of life chances relatively independent of the home country and thus insulates citizens from the consequences of domestic politics. I argue that the resulting decline in a “stake” in society reduces the perceived benefits of political engagement, and this leads to fewer incentives

ii on the part of citizens to hold the government accountable and to ensure eﬀective representation.

Using individual-level and subnational aggregate data from the Philippines, I demonstrate that migration changes how citizens relate to and seek to control the government. I first show that existing studies arguing that migration promotes citizens’ political engagement may be misleading theoretically and fail to hold up empirically in the Philippines. I then test my theoretical argument with individual-level survey data and show that households with family members abroad are less likely to rely on government services and more likely to feel insulated from the vagaries of the domestic economy. Finally, using province-level data on local elections, I show that electoral accountability—the extent to which citizens sanction the government based on its performance—suffers in a high-migration environment. I analyze gubernatorial election results and find that the extent to which voters reward or punish the incumbent governor on the basis of his or her performance varies depending on the prevalence of migration in that province. By operationalizing electoral accountability as incumbent governor’s vote share accounted for by the performance in office, I find that good performance by the incumbent is rewarded electorally when migration is low, but that the linkage between performance and an incumbent’s vote share becomes uncertain when migration increases. In sum, this project demonstrates that international migration may have unintended consequences for the quality of democracy in the country of origin by making citizens less willing to enforce the principle of representation to the government.

iii To my parents, Songtak Oh and Suja Lee

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have had the good fortune to meet and learn from many excellent people while working on this dissertation. My deepest gratitude goes to my dissertation committee. My advisor, Irfan Nooruddin, provided invaluable guidance and unwavering support throughout the dissertation process. I hope that one day I would become an advisor like him. I am deeply indebted to Marcus Kurtz for his careful attention and advice. Jeremy Wallace has been a consistent supporter and oﬀered insightful comments that were indispensable to completing this dissertation. Beyond the dissertation committee, Mathew Coleman helped me understand the political nature of human migration and provided guidance from the human geography perspective in the earlier stage of this dissertation.

In the Philippines, the University of the Philippines Third World Studies Cen- ter and the Institute for Popular Democracy (IPD) in Manila provided excellent institutional support and assistance with research contacts. Many from academia, government agencies, media outlets and civil society organizations oﬀered their valuable insights and observations about the Philippine society. Among others, I am extremely grateful to Joel Ariate, Aries Arugay, Nikkin Beronilla, Joseph Capuno,

v Jay Carizo, Grace Cruz, Mary Ann Joy Quirapas, and Joel Rocamora for their help and encouragement. I would also like to thank Bub-mo Jung of the University of the

Philippines for sharing his anthropological sensibilities and deep knowledge of the country. My ﬁeld work was supported by generous funds provided by the Mershon

Center for International Studies, the Oﬃce of International Aﬀairs, and the Alumni

Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship of Ohio State University.

I should also thank my fellow graduate students at Ohio State for their support, especially Quintin Beazer, Miryam Chandler, Soundarya Chidambaram, Eric

Grynaviski, Scott Powell, Jiwon Suh, and Abdulkadir Yildirim. Outside the political science department, a mathematician deserves special thanks. My ﬁnal years in

Columbus would have been diﬃcult without the friendship of Hye-Jin Park. Her support and care helped me overcome setbacks and even enjoy the dissertation writing process at times. My warmest gratitude goes to her.

The idea about studying international labor migration grew out of a research trip

I took to Burma many years ago. One day I was walking around a neighborhood in

Rangoon and noticed that disproportionately many houses had large anchor symbols painted on the outer walls. I soon learned that those houses had family members previously or currently working as seafarers on international shipping lines. Many

Burmese citizens I met subsequently were also former seafarers or had their kin working on sea vessels abroad. This dissertation does not discuss Burma directly, but it was Burma that made me pay attention to the impact of labor migration on the sending country in the ﬁrst place. So, in that sense, I owe this project in part to that country and everyone who helped me travel there and study its politics,

vi including Saya Kyaw Yin Hlaing, then in Singapore and now in Hong Kong, and many people in Burma whom I cannot name here for obvious reasons.

In Korea, my interest in political science and Southeast Asia was nurtured by two teachers. Insun You not only introduced me to Vietnamese history but guided me through further scholarship on this fascinating region. Chung-Si Ahn provided a critical link between political science and area studies. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them.

Closer to home, I am grateful to my parents, Songtak Oh and Suja Lee, for the gift of their presence in my life. My sister, Minyoung, and her own family have been extremely supportive. My brother, Baeklok, has cheered me all along the way from a distance. My life is a happier and richer one because of them.

Finally, my greatest personal debt is to Woo Hyun Chang. I thank him for his invaluable support, encouragement and presence.

vii VITA

1978 ...... Born in Korea

2001 ...... B.A. in Political Science

2004 ...... M.A. in Political Science

2005-Present ...... Graduate Teaching/Research Associate, The Ohio State University

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Political Science

Specialization: Comparative Politics

Specialization: International Migration

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iii

Acknowledgments ...... v

Vita...... viii

List of Tables ...... xii

List of Figures ...... xiv

CHAPTER PAGE

1 Introduction ...... 1

1.1 The Question ...... 1 1.2 Resources or Incentives?: Citizen Behavior in an Era of Interna- tional Migration ...... 5 1.3 Incentives for Being a “Good” Citizen ...... 8 1.4 Research Design ...... 12 1.4.1 Why the Philippines? ...... 13 1.4.2 Scope Conditions ...... 18 1.5 Outline of the Study ...... 22

2 A Theory of Demand for Accountable Government ...... 26

2.1 Introduction ...... 26 2.2 Does Exit Promote Voice? ...... 30 2.2.1 Networks that Connect: Migration and Two-Way Flows . . 31 2.2.2 Financial Remittances ...... 33 2.2.3 Social Remittances ...... 36 ix 2.2.4 Diaspora Mobilization ...... 38 2.3 Theoretical Framework: Migration, Participation, and Democratic Accountability ...... 41 2.3.1 A Model of Participation ...... 42 2.3.2 Incentives Matter: The Social Contract of Democracy and the Beneﬁts of Participation ...... 45 2.3.3 Voice in a Place of Exit: The Impact on Democratic Ac- countability ...... 50 2.4 The Argument ...... 54 2.5 Theoretical Implications ...... 58 2.6 Conclusion ...... 61

3 More Resources, More Voice? The Impact of Migration on Electoral Participation in the Philippines ...... 64

3.1 Introduction ...... 64 3.2 The Impact of Exit on Voice ...... 67 3.3 Migration and Electoral Participation ...... 73 3.4 Data and Measures ...... 75 3.5 Empirical Analysis ...... 83 3.5.1 Financial Remittances ...... 83 3.5.2 Social Remittances ...... 89 3.6 Robustness Checks ...... 94 3.7 Conclusion ...... 98 3.8 Appendix ...... 101

4 The Eﬀect of Migration on the Utility of Citizenship: Survey Evidence 103

4.1 Introduction ...... 103 4.2 External Resources and the Utility of Citizenship ...... 106 4.3 Measuring the Utility of Citizenship: Government Services and Pri- vate Solutions ...... 109 4.4 The Data ...... 115 4.5 Empirical Analysis ...... 119 4.5.1 Government Assistance and Private Solutions ...... 120 4.5.2 Economic Assessments ...... 124 4.6 Robustness Checks ...... 130 4.7 Conclusion ...... 132 4.8 Appendix ...... 135

x 5 Does Mobility Undermine Electoral Accountability? Retrospective Vot- ing in Philippine Provinces ...... 138

5.1 Introduction ...... 138 5.2 Migration and Electoral Accountability ...... 141 5.3 Data and Measures ...... 144 5.3.1 Measuring Electoral Outcomes ...... 146 5.3.2 Measuring Government Performance ...... 150 5.3.3 Measuring Migration ...... 157 5.3.4 Additional Control Variables ...... 160 5.4 Analysis ...... 163 5.4.1 Governance Performance ...... 166 5.4.2 Economic Performance ...... 169 5.5 Conclusion ...... 173 5.6 Appendix ...... 175

6 Conclusion ...... 176

6.1 Discussion of Findings ...... 176 6.2 Is This an Anti-Migration Argument? ...... 180 6.3 Future Research ...... 181 6.4 Concluding Remarks ...... 184

Bibliography ...... 186

xi LIST OF TABLES

TABLE PAGE

3.1 Overseas Filipino Stock ...... 76

3.2 Destinations of Filipino Migrant Workers ...... 77

3.3 Summary Statistics ...... 82

3.4 Turnout in 2001 and 2004 Elections, by Migration ...... 84

3.5 Involvement in Electoral Activity, by Migration ...... 85

3.6 Following Campaign News, by Migration ...... 86

3.7 Participation, by Migration ...... 87

3.8 Turnout in 2001 and 2004 Elections, by Migration Destination . . . . 89

3.9 Involvement in Electoral Activity, by Migration Destination . . . . . 91

3.10 Following Campaign News, by Migration Destination ...... 92

3.11 Social Remittances and Participation ...... 93

3.12 Testing Social Remittances with Gastil Index instead of Polity . . . . 95

3.13 Turnout: Comparing Former and Current Migrant Households . . . . 97

4.1 Summary Statistics ...... 119

4.2 Economic Assistance, by Migration ...... 121

4.3 Sources of Economic Assistance, by Migration ...... 122

xii 4.4 Retrospective Assessments, by Migration ...... 125

4.5 Prospective Assessments, by Migration ...... 126

4.6 Economic Insulation ...... 128

4.7 Predicted Probabilities ...... 130

4.8 Comparing Former and Current Migrant Households ...... 131

5.1 Summary Statistics ...... 162

5.2 Expected Coeﬃcients ...... 164

5.3 Performance and Incumbent’s Vote Share, by Migration ...... 165

5.4 Eﬀects of Performance and Migration on Incumbent Vote Shares . . 167

5.5 Eﬀects of Economic Conditions on Incumbent Vote Shares, by Migra- tion ...... 171

5.6 Data Sources ...... 175

xiii LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE PAGE

1.1 Worldwide Migration and Remittances ...... 2

1.2 Migration and Democratic Accountability ...... 11

1.3 Emigration and Remittances in the Philippines ...... 14

1.4 Migration Rate, by Province, 2000 ...... 17

2.1 Two Models of Participation ...... 43

2.2 Migration and Democratic Accountability ...... 55

2.3 Migration and Citizens’ Willingness to Ensure Accountability . . . . 57

4.1 Perceptions of Government Responsibilities and Development Levels by Country ...... 111

4.2 Economic Assistance, by Migration ...... 123

5.1 Electoral Accountability at Diﬀerent Migration Levels (DV = Incum- bent Vote Shares) ...... 168

5.2 Economic Voting at Diﬀerent Levels of Migration (DV = Incumbent Vote Shares) ...... 172

xiv CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 The Question

The foundation of representative democracy is a social contract under which citizens elect a government to secure common services. An implicit assumption of this principle is that citizens are immobile and enjoy no or few alternatives to the government. Thus, most political science discussions link democracy to nation-states and assume that people are locked in with a social contract into which they are more or less born. Under this assumption, citizens are expected to accept their polity as given and to enforce democratic representation as the principals in that relationship. What happens, however, to such a contract when large numbers of citizens become mobile and look overseas for employment and better life chances? The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in population movements and attendant resource ﬂows across borders. The most recent estimate indicates that about 215.8 million people, 3.2% of the world’s population, live outside their country of birth (World Bank 2011). Direct money transfers from migrants, known as remittances, reached $440 billion worldwide in 2010, of which $325 billion

1 went to developing countries (World Bank 2011). In some high-emigration countries, remittance inﬂows exceed foreign direct investment and foreign aid and, in more pronounced examples, they account for more than 10% of the country’s annual GDP (Dilip Ratha & Silwal 2009). As Figure 1.1 illustrates, migration has steadily increased over the past decades and the growth in remittances has been accelerating in recent years except during the global economic crisis in 2009.

Figure 1.1: Worldwide Migration and Remittances Sources: World Development Indicators 2010, United Nations De- partment of Economic and Social Aﬀairs (2006)

2 For political scientists, migration presents a unique, largely unexplored opportunity to study the citizen-government linkage in a new, mobile environment. For citizens, migration offers external resources and opportunities created relatively independently of domestic conditions. This implies that citizens can now imagine and plan for life opportunities outside the borders while attempting to free themselves from the political partnership with the home-country government. For governments, on the other hand, international migration challenges the state’s control over its population. Clearly, like international trade and financial globalization, migration nibbles away at state sovereignty (Sassen 1996). Increasing human mobility and the emergence of remittance-dependent economies undermine the power of the state in defining and determining economic and social lives of its citizens. In short, for both citizens and their governments, international migration represents a weakening of ties between them, and this has important political implications. The recent profusion of research tends to suggest that international migration empowers citizens and makes them more autonomous from the state. One important extension of the availability of external resources and opportunities is that citizens have more resources to voice their opinions to the government and they do so with greater bargaining power, thanks to the newly gained political autonomy. Repre- senting this sentiment, Kapur stated that “[r]emittances can be viewed as a political weapon of the weak. Rather than simply react to state policies, international migration and remittances has forced states to accommodate new realties. In lieu of political voice, migration becomes an exit strategy and remittances either fuel further exit or empower political voice by making available resources to new groups”

3 (Kapur 2004, p.14). This line of reasoning leads to the conclusion that international migration may promote democracy in the developing world. This dissertation tests the proposition that international migration inevitably empowers citizens by examining exactly how the availability of external resources and opportunities changes the citizen-government relationship. My thesis is that migration and remittances exert a negative influence on democratic representation because citizens with alternatives to government functions and services have fewer incentives to hold the government accountable for its performance. I challenge the prevailing notion that more resources to citizens in developing countries will lead inescapably to better citizen involvement in the political process. Instead, remittance resources produce private solutions for functions and services that are traditionally responsibilities of the government. One significant effect of this movement to private provision is to diminish the importance of the social contract with the government to the well-being of citizens. With a “less” stake in the contract, citizens’ willingness to demand accountability to the government and to enforce representation decreases. This dissertation takes a different approach from most recent scholarship on the political consequences of migration. Existing studies predominantly underscore the unprecedented creation of financial resources, driven by remittances, and argue that the growth in resources available for ordinary citizens promotes democracy in origin countries. In contrast, I focus on the incentive implications of migration-induced resource inflows—how individual citizens respond to the changing political context shaped by external resources and opportunities and how, in turn, this affects their cost-benefit calculus of sanctioning the government. Rather than simply assuming

4 that more resources translate into greater political engagement, this study emphasizes how incentives mediate the resource eﬀects between mobility and citizen behavior. That incentives matter as much as or even more than resources for political action is not new to political scientists. However, it has not been suﬃciently appreciated in the nascent literature on international migration.

1.2 Resources or Incentives?: Citizen Behavior in an Era of International Migration

My argument stands in contrast to existing studies on the political consequences of migration. Recent scholarship suggests that external resources and opportunities made available by migration will likely strengthen democracy in sending countries by emphasizing the resource dimension of migration outcomes.1 This increasingly popular view holds that migration-generated resources and the availability of exit options increase citizens’ political power and potentially lead to political reform. In doing so, the literature identifies two channels of influence. In the first, financial remittances take a central stage. This argument is motivated by an empirical observation that a historical level of remittances flow into developing countries and remittance income is crucial to many citizens of these countries. Remittances combine two distinct but interrelated characteristics to promote the voice of ordinary citizens. First, it has a simple income effect whereby it eases a

1Throughout this dissertation, a sending country refers to a migrant-sending country. The migration literature also uses an origin or source country depending on the context. This convention should not be confused with remittance-recipient countries, which are essentially migrant-sending countries.

5 constraint on political engagement attributed to the scarcity of financial resources. This view is supported by political science theories that resources are the most crucial determinant in political participation (Brady, Verba & Schlozman 1995). The second important characteristic of remittances is that they are foreign earnings, highlighted by the fact that these financial resources are obtained relatively outside the existing state control or local power structure (Kapur 2004). Given the context that many of migrants originate from countries where the government can be predatory or corrupt while existing socioeconomic arrangements undermine political equality, the economic autonomy created by remittances may provide much-needed political autonomy for ordinary citizens (Pfutze 2007). Second, in addition to financial income, existing studies suggest that migration may have an important externality of idea diffusion. The “social remittances” literature claims that migration may diffuse democratic ideas and practices. According to this view, migrants from developing countries (1) adopt new political beliefs and practices in better-governed host countries and (2) then spread these back to their home societies through migrant networks (de la Garza & Yetim 2003, Levitt 1998, Levitt 2001, Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010). Migrants observe how institutions function and citizens behave differently in the host country. In turn, these observations become knowledge, a point of reference or even inspirations that motivate change in the home society when migrants share these ideas with their families and friends. The empirical reality that countries that receive large numbers of migrants tend to be better governed than the typical high-emigration country implicitly drives this hypothesis. Existing theories, therefore, propose that contemporary international

6 migration can promote democracy. This view is appealing because it emphasizes the domestic consequences of globalization and does so by linking it to democracy promotion. Extant research, however, overlooks the incentive dimension of citizen behavior, which is essential to any systematic understanding of political act.2 Predominantly resource-centered, existing explanations pay scant attention to an important question: whether citizens always devote newly acquired resources to political engagement. The omission of incentives is particularly problematic because under high migration, resources and incentives are not mutually independent contributing factors to political participation. To the contrary, incentives for participation are endogenous to resource inflows in a migration setting: the fact that migration provides resources and opportunities external to the home political community could reduce incentives to engage in politics. Therefore, the migration-politics dynamics pose the irony that although migration may have the potential to increase political engagement in terms of resources, the same opportunity may simultaneously undermine the incentives to do so. For theoretical purposes, identifying this intermediary step is crucial for a better understanding of migration outcomes. In short, international migration can lower citizens’ willingness to ensure effective representation through monitoring and sanctioning the government because it frees, relatively but still significantly, themselves from the exclusive contract with the government for common services. In the presence of alternatives, the contract

2For an exception, see Goodman and Hiskey (2008).

7 with the government is less relevant and commands less attention. I discuss in more detail what these alternatives constitute in the next section.

1.3 Incentives for Being a “Good” Citizen

This study explores the impact of international migration on the citizen-government relationship. Specifically, I examine how the exit option and access to external resources affect the extent to which citizens demand accountability from the government. I construct a theoretical framework for this argument using (1) a simple model of participation that emphasizes incentives, (2) a social contract of democracy under which citizens and the government exchange benefits and responsibilities, and (3) the retrospective voting literature that stresses the importance of contexts in determining election results. A fully detailed discussion of this framework will be presented in Chapter Two. This section introduces a more general model and introduces key theoretical considerations. The most important political effect of migration is its economic outcomes, remittances. As discussed earlier, although remittances contribute a substantial size of financial resources to a migrant household, it is remittances’ external nature that is central to the recent set of claims that migration could strengthen the voice of ordinary citizens in developing countries. When more economic resources are distributed among ordinary citizens, they have more bargaining power against the government. And the political autonomy effect will be greater if migrants come from countries where a heavy presence of political inequality or clientelistic politics restricts citizens’ political power.

8 While it is true that foreign earnings and the prospect of life overseas increase the political autonomy of ordinary citizens, it does not automatically produce a political challenge to the status quo. To be sure, the importance of remittances to the national economy will prevent the government from overtly repressing migrant households or stealing remittance money with impunity. Such political autonomy, however, does not necessarily lead to demand for across-the-board improvement in governance. This is because remittances and migration diminish the importance of the government as a subject of political action largely through the emergence of private solutions. In many high-emigration countries, remittances are spent to substitute for services traditionally considered to be responsibilities of the government. Private alternatives are an important intermediary variable in this framework. Countries that send migrants in large numbers and for a long period of time tend to share certain characteristics in political and economic systems. They tend to be low- or middle- income countries with limited taxation capacity whose governments fall short on serving the collective needs and providing public goods. Under this condition, remittances are likely to lead to private solutions for government functions and services. Economists call this the “substitution” eﬀect whereby households secure private solutions from private contractors for what is otherwise publicly provided (Ahmed 2010, Chami, Barajas, Cosimano, Fullenkamp, Gapen & Montiel 2008). Modern governments have a broad mandate when it comes to services: education, health care, public works and economic development. When citizens have high expectations of the government regardless of its actual capacity to do, which is more so in developing countries (Chhibber, Shastri, & Sisson 2004), political autonomy may

9 alienate rather than empower citizens. In other words, remittance-induced private solutions, or self-provisions, limit the political autonomy effect of remittances. Political autonomy may be a double-edged sword. Does distance from the government always produce good political outcomes? In principle, citizens should be allowed to engage in independent decision-making. Yet a successful democracy requires a certain level of mutual interdependence between citizens and the government. Chaudry’s analysis of Yemen’s experience illustrates a case where political autonomy may be detrimental to the citizen-government relationship (1989). Re- mittance inflows from oil-rich neighbors created a thriving private sector in Yemen independent from state influence. This autonomous socioeconomic space, however, made the private sector vulnerable when the Yemeni state attempted to introduce extensive austerity reforms during the recession in the 1980s. In other words, the lack of linkage between the society and the government can be responsible for an inability to bargain successfully with the government. With the growth of foreign earnings and resulting private solutions, citizens may feel insulated from the consequences of domestic politics. Thus, the performance of the government, broadly defined, becomes less critical to the well-being of citizens. When citizens rely on overseas employment and expect to leave the country in the future, poor governance and mismanagement of economy are less punishable by migrants. Citizens may still want effective government but they may have fewer incentives to make sure that the government promotes the interest of the public. A critical manifestation of this disincentive effect develops in the form of voting decisions. This goes back to the basic principle of democracy that citizens not only

10 Figure 1.2: Migration and Democratic Accountability

choose the government but they are also expected to hold the government accountable for its performance through regular elections. Yet the migration-induced disincentive eﬀect produces an electorate that is less willing to demand accountability from its government. The linkage between government performance and election results thus becomes weak, decreasing the magnitude of electoral accountability . The argument so far is visually summarized in Figure 1.2. In short, migration considerably reduces the beneﬁts and privileges citizens expect from a contract they form with the government. The access to external resources and opportunities may enhance the political autonomy of citizens, but it creates disincentives for exercising accountability. International migration thus harms democracy.

11 1.4 Research Design

The core empirical task of this study is to link migration to specific citizen attitudes and voting behavior in a way to capture the hypothesized disengagement effect. The most reliable data to test the hypothesis that migration reduces citizens’ demand for accountable government would be experimental, individual-level data on the following four variables: (1) Migration: whether the voter has family members working abroad, how much remittances the household receives as a share of income, and whether the voter plans to migrate himeself or herself; (2) Private Solutions: household-level information on private solutions for public goods; (3) Government Performance: how the voter assesses the incumbent’s performance; and (4) Vote Choice: whether the voter supports the incumbent at the polls. Data containing all this information, unfortunately, are unavailable in the Philip- pines, or any country at present to my knowledge. In the absence of such data, I use a combination of individual and aggregate data whose sequential layering provides support for my core argument. In this study, I use individual-level and subnational data from the Philippines. My empirical strategy consists of three steps. First, I offer evidence that citizens from migrant households do not differ in terms of levels of participation from citizens from non-migrant households. This will help alleviate the concerns associated with the ecological inference using aggregate data in a later step. Since migration does not affect participation, aggregate election results can be interpreted as the difference in vote choice among citizens, not differing levels of participation. This point will be discussed in detail in Chapter Three. Second, I show that migrant households are less reliant on government functions

12 and services for their well-being and they feel insulated from macroeconomic conditions of the home country. This will support the causal mechanism that citizens under migration see fewer incentives to ensure effective representation. Finally, I move to aggregate election outcomes to show that the extent to which the electorate rewards or punishes the incumbent based on his or her performance is negatively affected by the presence of migration. This final step uses aggregate data but the previous two steps support an inference that the retrospective voting results at the aggregate level is caused by individual-level vote choice with hypothesized effects.

1.4.1 Why the Philippines?

The Philippines offers a particularly appropriate setting for studying the domestic impact of migration. It is a high-migration country in terms of the pervasiveness of migration and the relative importance of remittances to its domestic economy. In 2009, the number of Filipino migrant workers scattered all over the world reached 1.4 million, roughly 2% of total population, while 346,000 workers were newly hired (POEA 2009). The country’s economy is heavily dependent on migrant remittances, which reached $17.3 billion and constitutes over 10.8% of its annual GDP in 2009 (BSP 2010). Remittances have boosted the Philippine peso, eased the debt burden, tamed inflation, and contributed in general to the stability of the economy. A recent household-level study estimates that 23.3% of Filipino households received cash remittances in 2006 (Ang, Sugiyarto & Jha 2009). The high level of migration in the Philippines ensures a sufficient sample size of migrant households. Labor migration has a long history in the Philippines. Migration scholars di- vide the country’s century-long population out-movement into three periods (Rother 13 Figure 1.3: Emigration and Remittances in the Philippines Sources: World Development Indicators 2010, United Nations De- partment of Economic and Social Affairs (2006)

2009). The ﬁrst period saw the beginning of labor migration of Filipinos as plan- tation workers in Hawaii in the early twentieth century, which was right after the establishment of the US colonial rule in the archipelago.3 The next signiﬁcant phase came during the 1960s, when nearly a million, mostly middle class Filipinos moved permanently to the United States under a new US immigration regime established by the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act (Anderson 1998). Since many Filipino

3Between 1906 and 1934, some 120,000 Filipinos moved to the US (Asis 2008).

14 emigrants during this period were highly educated with professional backgrounds, this raised the concern of “brain drain.” Finally, labor migration in a current form started in the 1970s when large numbers of Filipino workers on a contract basis were employed in oil-rich Gulf countries to work on massive infrastructure projects. In 1978, “overseas manpower export” officially became a part of the Five Year Develop- ment Plan under the Marcos regime. Labor migration increased steadily throughout the 1980s when labor demand shifted toward professional and service workers. Gulf countries continued to need migrant workers to run their economies and households while non-traditional destinations in Europe and Asia also attracted a large number of service workers, including “caregivers.” Rising demands for service workers abroad increased female labor migration substantially in the Philippines (Asis 2008). Figure 1.3 shows the trends in out-migration and remittances over the past three decades. The rapid growth in migration in the late 1990s coincided with a severe economic recession under the Ramos administration. Remittances already surpassed official development assistance (ODA) into the Philippines in 1991 (Alegado 1997). Overseas employment is now a deeply entrenched social institution in the Philip- pines. The Philippine state has reorganized itself in such a way that it now regulates and operates programs regarding almost all aspects of labor migration, from pre-migration preparations to post-migration reintegration. Over the years, the government institutionalized a variety of legal codes, including the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipino Act of 1995, and government agencies to promote and regulate labor migration. In addition to the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), two agencies specific to labor

15 migration have been established: the Philippine Overseas Employment Administra- tion (POEA) regulates licensing of the migration industry and placement of labor migrants while the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) maintains welfare funds and programs for migrant workers. This “labor export” apparatus is unique in that a government is deeply involved in migration management, receiving much international attention (Agunias & Ruiz 2007). On the part of Philippine society, there exists an extensive migration industry, including over 1,000 licensed recruitment agencies for overseas workers (Asis 2008) and part of the education system has been transformed into vocational training for overseas employment. “Culture of migration” is also widespread (Scalabrini Migration Center 2005), as labor migration is now perceived as an attractive career option among ordinary Filipinos, not just as a temporary measure responding to an economic crisis. The country also instituted decentralization in 1991 and devolved important government responsibilities, including education, health, public works, environmental protection, and development, to lower levels of the government. Electoral oligopoly and clientelism continue to dominate many places, but some local governments com- mand high praise for reform and governance innovations, which allows me to exploit subnational variation in government performance (Capuno 2005, Galing Pook Foundation various years). Among local governments, I focus on the provincial level dynamics, which enables me to utilize data from 80 units. A single-country subnational comparative analysis gives me added leverage on controlling for many confounding factors that pose challenges to cross-national analysis. Figure 1.4 shows the distribution of migrant workers by province.

16 Figure 1.4: Migration Rate, by Province, 2000 (darker shades represent areas that send more migrants) Source: The Philippines 2000 Census of Population and Housing

The Philippines may be a more “typical” sending country than any other country in the world in the sense that it strikes a balance between the absolute and relative magnitude of migration. The Philippines is the fourth-largest recipient of migrant remittances in absolute terms ($21.3 billion) following India ($55.6 billion), China($51.6 billion) and Mexico ($22.6 billion) (World Bank 2011). Yet migration has more importance to the Philippines when compared with other top three

17 countries. China and India by far exceed any other countries in terms of the absolute number of migrants and volume of remittances. They are, however, populous countries with large economies, which diminishes the importance of migration and remittances in relative terms. In fact, remittances account for only 4% of India’s GDP, and the number is even lower at 3% for China. Even in Mexico, the contribution of remittances to national economy is 3%, much smaller than 12% of the Philippines. In addition, the geographic isolation of the Philippines helps to control any unobservable eﬀect of regional or international forces on migration and political outcomes.

1.4.2 Scope Conditions

Before proceeding, it is useful to discuss the scope conditions of this study. I begin by emphasizing that my argument only concerns how many citizens leave the country and nothing else. In other words, my theoretical argument and empirical analysis is limited to mass migration. This may appear odd considering the standard approach to migration is to start from the characteristics of the migrants, namely, “who leaves, for where, when, and why?” (Kapur 2010a). Migrants differ in their predispositions and capacities to engage in politics and this certainly has implications for the political consequences of their absence and their transnational engagement with the home society. Timing of migration could be also critical: migration during an economic crisis may have different political effects than migration during a boom time (Wright 2009). Once they leave, migration outcomes, remittances and knowledge acquisition should differ depending on the human capital of migration. The political and economic institutions 18 of the destination country may also shape the terms and contents of the interaction between migrants and their home communities, resulting in differential levels of remittances and transnational ties. Finally, political exiles or refugees are likely to engage their home country differently than economic migrants. In sum, there are theoretical reasons that we should expect migration’s impact on domestic politics to be different depending on migrants’ characteristics. Nonetheless, considering the lack of sufficient knowledge and empirical data about the political impact of migration, it should be justifiable that we begin with a simple model of migration. This is a crude but important first step in investigating migration’s impact on democratic governance. Second, this project does not address non-electoral forms of participation. There- fore, lobbying or political activism through party systems will not be considered. Al- though it is not the focus of this study, migration’s potential impact through these channels warrants a few theoretical and empirical discussions, which I present in the following paragraphs. In response to the increasing importance of overseas employment and remittance to the national economy, sending-country governments have instituted various policy measures to advance the interests of migrants and migrant households, including overseas absentee voting. Advocacy movements to call attention to the plights of migrant workers played an important role in government programs to regulate labor export in the Philippines. (Agunias & Ruiz 2007).4 Yet migrants’ groups have failed

4The Philippines has an impressive array of state apparatus to promote and “protect” overseas Filipino workers. The government not only regulates overseas placement through licensing but manages government-operated welfare fund for repatriation and insurance.

19 to develop into a viable political force as an effective political party or a coherent interest group. In my research country of the Philippines, there is no effective party that represents the sectoral interests of migrants and their families. Migrante International, the most well-known non-government migrant advocacy group, participated in the party-list election in 2004 but failed to gained any seat. They did not participate in the subsequent 2007 election and the Commission on Elections controversially ruled the group unqualified to contest for the 2010 election. On the other hand, the “migrants”’ agenda has been adopted by the government as well as mainstream politicians. The establishment of OWWA, a welfare agency for migrants, represents an important government initiative to respond to the social pressure from migrants. In a recent example, presidential candidates campaigned heavily on a platform of protecting overseas Filipino workers during the 2009 race (Senate of the Philippines 2009a, Senate of the Philippines 2009b). Third, my analysis is limited to migration out of a democracy. Analyzing the contract between citizens and the government under democracy is conceptually simpler due to its voluntary nature. The citizen-government relationship under dictatorship, on the contrary, requires starkly different assumptions. The exchange between citizens and an authoritarian state is problematic to model on a contractual basis mainly because exit or voice is not free. This is where this study diverges from the existing literature that examines migration’s effect at the regime level. Most accounts on migration’s political consequences touch upon regime stability in one

20 way or another. Earlier works on migration highlighted the negative effect on authoritarian durability and the state manipulation.5 In his recent work that examines variation in the impact of economic crisis on democratization, Wright brings empirical evidence to bear on this claim and argues that where citizens have more viable exit alternatives, economic crisis causes citizens to exit rather than result in opposition mobilization, making democratization less likely (2009). Another group of work argues that remittances prevented an outburst of popular discontent in the Middle East (Ghalioun 2004). Finally, the link between remittance inflows and the quality of institutions is beyond the scope of this study. Abdih and Montiel (2008) argue that because remittances lead households to depend less on government services, government corruption becomes less costly for citizens and therefore they fight it less vigorously. “[B]y act- ing as a buffer between the government and its citizens, result in misbehavior; these flows allow households to purchase the public good rather than rely solely on the government to provide that good, which reduces the household’s incentive to hold the government accountable” (p.16). They suggest that, as a consequence, government corruption is likely to increase. Ahmed (2010) also suggests that remittances cause a decrease in public goods provision and an increase in government corruption. Although these authors are silent on the political process of citizens’ calculus and governance outcomes, their insights are consistent with my argument.

5The practice of exile, self-imposed or forced, of prominent political ﬁgures has been historically widespread. Yet Castro’s Cuba and the Soviet Union in the post-Stalin era utilized this method extensively (Hirschman 1986, p.91).

21 1.5 Outline of the Study

The dissertation is organized as follows. In Chapter Two, I review current views on the political consequences of migration and present my theoretical argument that migration undermines the extent to which citizens demand accountable government. Drawing from the insights of work in participation and accountability, I suggest migration creates a disincentive effect for citizens’ political engagement. In contrast to many of the previous studies that highlight financial and social remittances as a source of citizen empowerment, I focus on how these new resources may reduce benefits of political engagement. In a simple political participation model, citizens participate when the benefits outweigh the costs. The key consideration is that although resources may reduce the cost of voice in a migration context, they also reduce the benefit of participation by reducing the utility of citizenship-access to public goods and government services exclusively available to citizens of a polity. This disengagement effect may have particularly adverse effects on one area of citizen-government relationship in democracy: accountability. I argue that since the utility of citizenship declines as a consequence of the availability of exit and external resources, the benefits of monitoring and sanctioning elected officials decrease substantially in a high-migration context. Migration exerts a negative influence on citizen engagement in politics, and this is manifested in the extent to which citizens ensure effective representation, especially holding the government accountable to the public. The empirical section of this dissertation is composed of two parts: Chapters

22 Three and Four discuss individual-level differences in political attitudes in the different levels of migration. Chapter Five examines aggregate data on subnational elections. This multi-level layering is necessary to link individual-level causal mechanism to aggregate outcomes and, thus, to have a better understanding of how migration affects the political process. Chapter Three presents individual-level data to challenge existing accounts of migration and support the first component of the causal mechanism of this study. The existing literature suggests that migration potentially strengthens citizens’ voice in the governing process and highlights two mechanisms: (1) financial remittances, that is, external funds flowing in as a result of labor migration and (2) “social” remittances, which refer to political attitudes and values transmitted through migration channels. In this chapter, I test empirical implications of these arguments with a focus on electoral participation using survey data. The financial remittances model predicts that citizens receiving remittances from abroad are more likely to become involved in politics since additional resources reduce the cost of participation. I find instead that members of migrant households do not exhibit any difference in voter turnout, involvement in campaign work, or interest in campaign news. The social remittances model anticipates that citizens with a family member in a democratic host country are more likely to participate in the political life since they come in contact with democratic values and practices transmitted by migrants. I find, to the contrary, that members of migrant households with ties to democracy are neither more nor less engaged in electoral participation. Taken as a whole, these results

23 challenge the view that migration strengthens the voice of those left behind, at least through the electoral participation channel. Chapter Four addresses the most important theoretical and empirical treatment of my argument. My hypothesis about international migration and democratic accountability is predicated on the micrologic that high levels of migration and remittance inflows diminish the importance of the social contract between citizens and the government. In this chapter, I provide empirical support for this underlying logic by analyzing how migration affects the relationship between citizens and the government in two politically important areas. Using survey data, I examine to what extent (1) citizens turn to the government for economic assistance and (2) they feel insulated from the performance of the national economy. I find evidence that members of migrant households are less reliant on government services and they also feel their personal financial situations outperform the macroeconomic conditions. These findings suggest that access to external resources and opportunities diminishes the demand for direct benefits of citizenship, such as access to government functions and services, while it insulates citizens from the country’s economic performance, which is an important accountability area for modern governments. Chapter Five examines the aggregate-level data of retrospective voting in a migration context. To what extent does the availability of exit and external income change the way citizens respond to the government for its performance? In this chapter, I present evidence for my argument that migration undermines citizens’ exercise of accountability. To test this proposition, I use an original dataset from the Philippine provinces and examine how migration conditions the extent to which

24 citizens reward or punish incumbent governors for their performance. I measure performance by changes in school enrollment, local revenue generation, and economic development. I find substantial support for the hypothesis that migration dampens the marginal effect of performance on electoral support: good performance of the incumbent is electorally rewarded when migration is low, but the linkage between performance and an incumbent’s vote share becomes uncertain when migration increases. Furthermore, the results also highlight the causal claim that the electorate in a high-migration environment is more insulated from economic fortunes of the home country. Taken together, these findings suggest that migration undermines the magnitude of democratic accountability. Finally, Chapter Six summarizes the main findings, discusses implications and explores directions for future research. As a whole, the evidence presented in this study calls for a revision to our understanding of the politics of international migration. The impression left by much recent work in this area is that international labor mobility may be an unmitigated blessing for democracy in the developing world. Perhaps due to the sheer volume of remittance resources, the analysis in the literature has been dominated by the focus on the presence of these resources. I suggest here that resources have unintended, perverse consequences on the incentives for citizens to demand good government. Individuals have a right to mobility and it should be acknowledged as such. Nonethe- less, it should be noted that there are possible adverse effects on the collective level and this should be part of our conversation.

25 CHAPTER 2

A THEORY OF DEMAND FOR ACCOUNTABLE

GOVERNMENT

2.1 Introduction

Recent years have seen growing interest in understanding the consequences of international migration for the political, economical and social life of developing countries. In a clear departure from the earlier migration literature that primarily focused on the impact of “immigration” mainly on wealthy democratic countries, this new wave of research attempts to shed light on how labor outflows and associated remittance inflows affect the economic and political landscape of the developing world. That many of these migrant-sending countries are low- and middle-income countries with significant political challenges has lead scholars to pay special attention to the relationship between migration on the one hand, and economic growth and the strengthening of democracy on the other. This new literature includes efforts to describe and charac- terize various economic outcomes of international migration, with a particular focus on the rise of world mass migration (Hatton & Williamson 2005), the economic impact of remittance inflows on the recipient country and individual households (World

26 Bank 2006, Yang 2009), the magnitude and consequences of brain drain (Faini 2007), gains from brain “return” (Kapur 2010a), and implications for domestic monetary policy autonomy (Singer 2010). Much of the research emphasizes the financial and non-financial resources associated with the migration phenomenon. Political consequences of migration are less well understood compared to its economic effects, but the resource implications clearly drive much of the emerging body of work. Studies in political science and sociology emphasize that international migration challenges the state’s control of its population by providing citizens with resources and opportunities emanating outside the borders (Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010, Pfutze 2007). In a broader perspective, international labor mobility, remittance flows, and transnational migration networks are also discussed as part of globalization eroding the nation-state system (Sassen 1996). Extant studies of migration begin with a premise that, in contemporary migration, “exit” and “voice” are not mutually exclusive but closely interrelated. The dominant approach in the literature holds that exit of some citizens promotes the

27 voice of “those left behind.”1 This increasingly popular view suggests that migration- generated resources and the availability of exit options increase citizens’ political power and potentially lead to political reform. In doing so, the literature points to two channels of influence. First, financial remittances provide resources for political participation. Translating economic wealth into political power, scholars predict that remittances not only expand citizens’ resources for participation but also increase their political autonomy by providing an external source of income (Kapur 2004, Pfutze 2007). Second, migration may transmit political knowledge and attitudes. In this view, migrants to better-governed countries adopt and spread new political beliefs and practices back to their homelands through migrant networks (de la Garza & Yetim 2003, Levitt 2001, Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010). Combined, the rise of remittances and expansion of transnational ties have led many policymakers, academics, and journalists to consider that migration-driven resource inflows may strengthen the voice of citizens in developing countries. Yet these resource-centered accounts overlook the incentive dimension of political behavior. Although resources may reduce the cost of voice, it also reduces the benefit

1It is important to note that “those left behind” consist of two distinct groups: one tied to and benefiting from migration labor of their family members and the other belonging to the rest of the population. To be sure, this distinction can be easily challenged in a sense that the impact of migration usually goes beyond a single household. Remittances have a spill-over effect on local and national economies. High migration also has a demonstration effect that leads members of non-migrant households to adopt the preferences and expectations of migrant households to an extent. From this perspective, any member of societies sending out large numbers of migrants and dependent on remittances can be considered to be influenced by migration and remittances. Nonetheless, for purposes of this study, it is necessary to maintain this distinction for conceptual clarification. Thus, examining the effect of migration on citizens from non-migrant households is beyond the scope of this dissertation.

28 of participation by reducing the utility citizens expect to gain from such participation. The key consideration, central to my argument and often ignored in current views, is that the availability of exit and resource inflows provide a possibility of life chances independent of the home country, and thus insulates citizens from the consequences of domestic politics.2 The resulting decline in a “stake” in society reduces the perceived benefits of political engagement. The irony is that although migration may have the potential to increase political engagement in term of resources, the same opportunity may simultaneously undermine the incentives to do so. In this chapter, I present a theoretical framework as to how migration creates political disengagement among citizens in a sending country. Specifically, I prof- fer an argument focusing on the demand side of electoral accountability. Electoral accountability is an appropriate avenue to study the impact of migration on the citizen-government relationship primarily because the extent to which citizens demand accountability from their representatives can be explained by the cost-benefit model of participation. Accountability enforcement includes both costs and benefits of participation and we can investigate how migration affects each respectively using theories of participation and accountability. Based on insights from the literatures on participation and democratic accountability, I argue that migration hurts democracy by creating disincentives for citizens to ensure effective representation. The basic idea of representative democracy is that citizens not only choose the government to provide services and protection but

2For an exception, see Goodman and Hiskey (2008).

29 also that they hold the government accountable for its performance through regular elections—the success of democracy depends on how vigorously citizens monitor and sanction their government. Yet when the benefits of such a contract, that is, government provisions exclusively available to citizens of that polity, decline with the rise of externally available resources and opportunities, the expected benefits of sanctioning elected officials should decrease substantially. In other words, because migration undermines the utility of the social contract of democracy, it also undermines the willingness of citizens to enforce accountability. Even though political resources at the citizens’ disposal may increase, they face fewer incentives to put them to use in the political arena.

2.2 Does Exit Promote Voice?

Recent studies of migration emphasize that migration provides citizens of the sending country with resources—both monetary and non-monetary—that would be harnessed to increase their political power. That migration may empower migrants and those left behind is a new interpretation of Albert Hirschman’s famous exit-voice proposition. In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970), Hirschman stated that as a response to deteriorating performance of an organization, individuals either “exit” or “voice” their concerns. Earlier accounts of the impact of exit on voice largely concluded that exit is not only an alternative to voice for those who opt out, but that it also undermines the voice of those who

30 stay behind. Since those who exit are likely to be more driven members of the organization, their absence will therefore contribute to the continuation of the status quo or the eventual decline of the organization (Hirschman 1986).

2.2.1 Networks that Connect: Migration and Two-Way Flows

Yet contemporary migration exhibits a characteristic absent in Hirschman’s original framework: cross-border migrant ties. One of the most important characteristics of today’s migration is the presence of migrant networks. Migration is not a one- way exit from the home country, but rather a geographic expansion of migrants’ initial social networks. Remittances flow back and information is exchanged through this channel. It is important to note that migration outcomes discussed in this study—backward flows to the country of origin—are actually embedded in the migration process: migrant networks are one of the determinants of migration flows. By definition, migration, a population movement in search of a better material life, is driven by expected economic gains adjusted for the cost of migration. Migra- tion research identifies the income gap as the most prominent predictor for bilateral migration flows, but it also highlights the presence of migrant networks along with immigration policies of the destination country (Borjas 2001, Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino & Taylor 1998, Mayda 2010, Ortega & Peri 2009). Migrant networks significantly lower the cost of migration. The presence of families or friends in the potential destination country reduces information and transac- tion costs associated with international relocation (Epstein & Gang 2006). Previous migrants provide valuable information about employment opportunities as well as

31 the passage to the destination. They can also provide new arrivals with food, shel- ters, and credit while serving as a cultural intermediary between new migrants and the host environment (Carrington, Detragiache & Vishwanath 1996). The importance of transnational migrant networks has been extensively studied in sociological and anthropological examinations, including in contexts of local-to-local and local- to-global connections (Levitt 2001, Orozco 2003). One particular outcome of the network eﬀect in migration is ethnic and regional clustering where clustering takes place on a considerably narrower scale. An extensive literature on transnational migrant networks provides rich insights about how contemporary migration operates and why it persists despite apparent political and economic obstacles.3 This transnational linkage is the basis for the proposition that, as far as contemporary migration goes, exit not only becomes inseparable from voice but it may well strengthen voice. How might migration promote citizens’ voice in a sending country?

3For other “causes” of migration, gaps in income per capita across countries constitute the first structural factor that contributes to the rise in international migration. In their recent attempt to explain bilateral flows, Ortega and Peri find that a rise in the income gap by $1000 per person increases bilateral flows by about 10% (Ortega & Peri 2009, p.4). Other individual-level studies examine earning gaps while considering skill levels of migrants. This is because although wage gaps across countries are a good starting point, what is theoretically more relevant is gaps in wages for the same worker across countries adjusted for education and skills (Pritchett 2006). Micro-level econometric studies taking this approach find wage increases for the same workers before and after they move to the US (Jasso, Rosensweig & Smith 2003). Seen from a broad perspective, wage gaps represent various structural conditions that are responsible for lack of opportunities or general material deprivation. The immigration regime in the destination country is also an important constraint on migration flows. Ortega and Peri report that a more restrictive immigration policy (measured by policy reform) leads to lower immigration flows by 6% to 10% (2009, p.4). This supports a view that, although globalization appears to erode the autonomous policy-making capacity of the state, it still retains extensive power to regulate and control population inflows. In recent years, international migrants have built a transnational political and social space, but their social action often transpires within the terms defined by the state and domestic politics of the destination country (Waldinger & Fitzgerald 2004).

32 The literature oﬀers at least three major channels through which migration may contribute to voice. In the following subsections, I discuss them.

2.2.2 Financial Remittances

The first channel of influence is financial remittances. Due to the dramatic growth in global remittance flows in recent years, international development agencies, policymakers, scholars, and journalists are paying increasing attention to the “gains” from remittances (Asia Development Bank 2005, International Organization for Migration 2006, OECD 2007, World Bank 2006). Official migrant remittances are now at a record high, estimated at $415 billion per year, exceeding traditionally important international financial flows, such as official development assistance and foreign direct investment in many labor-exporting countries (World Bank 2011). Moreover, for a number of countries like Haiti, El Salvador, and the Philippines, remittances constitute more than a tenth of annual GDP.4

4IMF defines remittances as “household income from foreign economies arising mainly from the temporary or permanent movement of people to those economies,” including cash and noncash items (2009). Remittances are conventionally measured by combining officially recorded workers’s remittances, compensation of employees, and migrant transfers in the balance of payments statistics. The true extent of remittances flowing through “informal” channels such as cash carried in person or in-kind transfers, although estimated to be substantial, is unknown.

33 By definition, remittances create more resources for citizen participation.5 Re- mittances first and foremost expand the size of household economic resources. The economic literature offers evidence that remittances reduce poverty, smooth con- sumption in response to income shocks, increase investment in human capital, and promote entrepreneurial activities (Adams & Page 2005, Beine, Docquier & Rapoport 2008, Durand, Parrado & Massey 1996, Faini 2007, World Bank 2006, Yang & Martinez 2005, Yang & Choi 2007). The political science literature on participation considers resources as the principal factor to predict citizens’ involvement in politics (Brady, Verba & Schlozman 1995). Resources important to political activity are diverse, ranging from money and time to civic skills. Yet since money is fungible, it has the most advantage. Remittance income may have a greater impact when migrants come from a relatively low-income country where political action incurs high opportunity costs for ordinary citizens. The “modernization” effect may also help to fight clientelism, a particularly problematic form of democratic politics in developing countries. The literature on clientelism finds that poverty is consistently, albeit in varied forms, linked to clientelistic practices, whereby citizens offer their votes in direct exchange for money, jobs, goods, or services (Kitschelt & Wilkinson 2007). The poor may exhibit higher discount rates for future, broadly defined benefits—what government policies

5The macroeconomic impact of remittances is a separate topic, although the patterns are also consistent with the observation that migration has a pro-status quo bias. Recent studies have found that remittances insulate the recipient country from ﬁnancial crises (Esteves & Khoudour- Casteras 2009) and allow its government to maintain monetary policy autonomy, for instance, adopting ﬁxed exchange rates in an international environment where such policy moves are unlikely to be sustainable otherwise (Singer 2010).

34 or programmatic goods usually offer and thus rather seek targeted, short-term gains from their political act (Scott 1969). As such, voters will be less responsive to clientelistic offers from politicians if their material well-being improves. Therefore, to the extent that large-scale labor migration and clientelism are concurrent traits of underdevelopment, remittance income may increase the political voice of ordinary citizens. In short, this implies that to the extent that resources constrain political participation, remittances—the quintessential migration outcome—should be linked to an increase in citizen involvement in politics. Remittances have another equally important trait as a financial source of participation. Scholars highlight the fact that remittances are private, exogenous transfers and argue that as such, remittances enhance citizens’ bargaining power in the political process. One of the unique characteristics of remittances is that they are private transfers that are generated outside, and largely bypass, the often corrupt and dys- functional government.6 As the government and ruling elites come to learn that as citizens enjoy independently created economic growth and security, suppressing or co-opting them will become more costly. Even in the absence of collective action of migrants, more economic power and independence brought by migration may shift the citizen-government relationship in favor of citizens. This logic leads many to believe that remittances can empower citizens against local strongmen or a misbe- having government. Implicit in this view that “remittances are a political weapon

6Although some governments, such as Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, tax remittances, they are exceptions (de Luna-Martinez 2005).

35 of the weak” (Kapur 2004, p.14) is the lack of political autonomy for ordinary citizens, which is usually attributed to the state control of the economy or income equality of the society. A large public sector or an exclusive access to economic activities enjoyed by a political party or a speciﬁc social class will certainly limit the political choices of the masses (Greene 2007). This will lead to an assumption that citizens’ distance from the state only promotes their voice. Applying this insight to the migration context, Pfutze (2007) claims that the non-taxability of remittances reduces an incumbent government’s ability to maintain political patronage systems, and that it contributed to the electoral success of the opposition party in Mexico’s 2000 presidential election.

2.2.3 Social Remittances

What flows in as a result of out-migration is not limited to monetary remittances. Many migration scholars increasingly argue that migration not only transfers economic resources but also spreads attitudes and preferences. As a consequence of migration, direct interaction increases between citizens of developing countries and different political, economic, and social institutions outside of their homeland. The literature of transnationalism has developed around the argument that through the intimate ties between migrants and their families back home, newly adopted views and opinions flow back to the origin country. This perspective places special emphasis on the communication and diffusion taking place through the migrant network. Today’s migrants maintain strong transnational ties through phone calls, the internet, return visits, and other forms of commu- nications. Through the durable ties, migrants communicate to their family members 36 ideas and observations. They naturally highlight the “differences” they notice at the destination—that, for example, politicians are held accountable, women enjoy a higher social status, and lines are shorter at city halls in the host country:

“When I go home, or speak to my family on the phone, I tell them everything about my life in the United States. What the rules and law are like. What is prohibited here. I personally would like people in the Dominican Republic to behave the way people behave here. [...] These things and many more, the good habits I’ve acquired here, I want to show people at home.”

A Dominican migrant in Boston quoted in Levitt (1998).

These transferred ideas and observations—“social remittances” (Levitt 1998, Levitt 2001, Lamba-Nieves & Levitt 2011)—are an important byproduct of international migration and provide a source of inspiration as well as information for voice for those staying behind. Although social remittances are framed as value-neutral, posited that they could be positive or negative (Levitt 1998), the transnationalism literature in general implicitly suggests that this international connectivity will result in positive changes in the sending communities (Lamba-Nieves & Levitt 2011). Drawing on evidence primarily from the migration from Latin America to the United States, this literature suggests that migrants to a well-established democracy are immersed in a democratic environment where they learn, adopt, and reinforce democratic values, orientations, skills, and commitments. It also claims that migrants simultaneously and subsequently share these attitudes with their kin in the country of origin through various migration channels. Survey evidence indicates that respondents on migration networks—return migrants, friends and family of migrants and residents of a high migration community—show higher levels of tolerance, critical attitudes toward the government, and participation in civic aﬀairs (Camp 2003, de la 37 Garza & Yetim 2003, Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010). According to these ﬁndings, current migration may be a new type of civic education that enlightens citizens of sending countries to democratic principles and empowers them to demand change.7 This view emphasizes the global dimension in political learning at the mass level and suggests that integration with the world economy complements and even substitutes for home-grown political socialization.

2.2.4 Diaspora Mobilization

Finally, the literature emphasizes what I label as diaspora mobilization, which en- compasses hometown associations, overseas civil society, and overseas voting. Unlike the preceding two channels, here the focus is on migrants themselves. Migrants may reside outside the country, but they maintain ties with their home societies and often get involved in the social, political, and economic life back home. They are depicted to represent a more independent, resourceful, and motivated political force that could possibly serve as an “agent” of change. In the ﬁrst instance, hometown associations (HTAs) are drawing increasing attention for their contribution of collective remittances for local development projects (Orozco 2003).8 There is evidence

7Another, although indirect, pathway to citizen empowerment concerns migration-driven human capital externalities. Recent works on brain drain suggests that, contrary to popular views, skilled migration can boost the human capital accumulation in developing countries by raising the expected returns to education. If the public overinvest in education—more people become skilled workers but not all of them emigrate—the country may end up with a high level of human capital (Beine, Docquier & Rapoport 2008, Docquier, Faye & Pestieau 2008). To the extent that education is connected to the production and reproduction of the middle class, migration may have some side eﬀects of shoring up the constituency for democratic reform.

8HTAs are well-known in local communities in the Philippines and finance a wide variety of projects: “[t]he workers have contributed money to help build roads, schools, water grids and 38 that HTA activities are positively associated with the state of local infrastructure such as schools, health centers and roads (Beauchemin & Schoumaker 2009). Reflecting the perceived importance of HTAs, some sending country governments have introduced a set of policies to harness the development potential of collective remittances. The most well-known example is Mexico’s Three-for-One program, where the government matches $3 for each $1 contributed by HTAs for local infrastructure projects (Aparicio & Meseguer 2009). It is debatable to what extent such programs are scalable and effective for development, but the important point here is the emergence of migrant associations as a new political actor in the politics of community development. Burgess (2005) argues that HTA involvement in community projects in Mexico generates more equal local development outcomes because HTAs operate with more independence from the existing power structure. Furthermore, in light of the growing migrant population, many sending countries have introduced overseas voting, allowing migrants to participate in national, and in some cases even local, elections (Ellis, Navarro, Morales, Gratschew & Braun 2007). There are expectations that migrants as a group will be more principled voters, insulated from non-democratic practices such as vote buying and election-related violence that might be prevalent in home settings (Kapur & McHale 2003, Teves 2009, Zezima 2010). Portes characterizes such expectations in the following way:

“[A] potentially positive eﬀect of expatriate communities consist of their capacity to vote in national elections, freed from the clientelistic and coercive

other infrastructure usually handled by local governments. They pay for annual ﬁestas that were traditionally ﬁnanced by municipalities, churches and local businesses” (Onishi 2010). Anecdotal evidence of HTAs are plentiful across many sending countries.

39 pressured commonly applied by political elites to a captive national electorate. Once granted the right to vote, expatriates can act as a powerful moralizing force and as a potentially decisive political level.” (2010, p.1554-1555)

Finally, in addition to their economic resources from remittances, their overseas location may permit space for more independent political judgement compared to those staying home. Another diaspora mobilization takes a form of a global advocacy network for diverse political causes. For migrants hailing from authoritarian countries, overseas “civil society,” an extended form of exile community, serves as an alternative voice for those who remain in a restricted political space such as Cuba and Burma (Pedraza 2007, Brees 2009).9 In sum, the current view highlights that migration creates financial, attitudinal, and network resources that can be harnessed by citizens to strengthen their political voice. Although the mechanisms discussed so far are diverse, they all point to the same intermediary outcome, the creation or strengthening of anti-status quo citizenry through the expansion of resources. This premise is based on an assumption that when more resources are available for citizens to expand their political power, we should expect an increase in their voice. Yet do more resources always increase citizen participation? The next section offers an alternative argument that, to the contrary, exit may have adverse effects on voice.10

9It should be note that political eﬀects of diaspora is not always presumed to be benign. An extensive literature documents the ﬁnancial and political support of overseas citizens for extremist groups or separatist movements in the country of origin. “Long distance nationalism” (Anderson 1998, Kapur 2010b) is a fascinating topic but out of the scope of this research.

10How novel is international migration? What sets today’s migration apart from its predecessors is its enduring transnational ties, captured by remittance ﬂows. To be sure, the migration 40 2.3 Theoretical Framework: Migration, Participation, and Democratic Accountability

Recent migration scholarship makes an important intellectual contribution by emphasizing that, in the current phase of international migration, exit is intrinsically linked to voice. Existing studies, however, fail to assess properly the impact of exit on voice on balance. They primarily focus on how migration may reduce the costs of political engagement, but ignore how it may also undermine the benefits of citizens’ involvement in politics. To put it differently, the emphasis on migration-driven resource inflows fails to take account of incentives to use resources for such political engagement. In this section, I present my theoretical framework of exit-voice dynamics.

we have witnessed in recent decades has a historical precedent (Strikwerda 1999). During the age of mass migration between 1840 and 1913, or what has come to be called “the first global century” among economic historians, more than 40 million people migrated from Europe to the New World (Hatton & Williamson 1994). Migration was already a household-level strategy to send one or several members of the family abroad so that they can send back remittances to support those left behind. The Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank offered remittance services to Irish immigrants in New York as early as the 1850s, and many Italian-American banks were established in the United States (Esteves & Khoudour-Casteras 2009). There was also political knowledge channeled by migraton: an emigrant song of the early 1830s that circulated widely in Germany caught the attention of Prussian authority by contrasting the German social system compared to what migrants experienced in America. The song deplored “the chains of slavery, of hunger and cares, of princes ‘who drive us to despair, their courts who consume our marrows, their brood of rats,’ the ministries, oppressive taxes of all kinds’ and a class system of justice. To this is contrasted the egalitarianism of America” (Kamphoefner 1987, p.60). The current phase of mass migration, which began after World War II, retains some characteristics of the first wave of international migration that ended before 1914. However, contemporary migration differs in that its global reach is more extensive and destinations are more diverse. The importance of remittances to national economy is unprecedented in many countries.

41 2.3.1 A Model of Participation

Before proceeding to discuss how migration changes participation, it is useful to examine a basic model of participation. In a simple political participation model, citizens participate when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs (Downs 1957). It follows from this that citizens expecting greater net benefits from political involvement are more likely to participate, and those expecting fewer benefits are less likely to participate. Moving beyond election-day turnout, this cost-benefit calculus can be applied to a wide array of citizen involvement in the governing process. In the participation literature, the cost side of the equation, specifically, the factors that reduce the cost for participation, is better understood than the benefit side. In their comprehensive treatment of the topic, Brady, Scholzman and Verba (1995) emphasize resources, engagement, and recruitment as critical predictors of citizen participation in politics. Although they give serious attention to all three factors, they place special emphasis on resources: “focusing on resources provides a powerful and theoretically satisfying explanation of disparities across individuals and groups in the extent to which they take part in political life” (p.16). In their model, resources such as time, money, and cognitive skills, which enable individuals to use given time and money more effectively, are a predominant, structural factor. Although issue engagement and recruitment play a role, their effects are either short-lived or limited in magnitude compared to resources. Resources are what make individuals able to afford to participate. More resources means lower costs of participation.11

11I do not consider opportunity costs associated with resources spent on political activities.

42 Figure 2.1: Two Models of Participation

(a) “Exit Promotes Voice”

(b) “Exit Hurts Voice”

Seen from this perspective, it is apparent that existing migration research takes a similar approach to the exit-voice relationship. Remittances increase the level of household income and with more money, household members may have more time and better skills to be devoted to political activity. Social remittances scholars would further argue that secondhand exposure to better-governed societies provides ideas and knowledge—other forms of resources, broadly deﬁned—to foster participation. However, the current views ignore the role of incentives, which are an integral part of the participation mechanism. Resources matter, but it is important to be

43 reminded that resources only make it easier for the citizen who is willing to use them for participation. As illustrated in Figure 2.1 (a), existing studies assume that migration infuses more resources into the participation model, leaving the incentive component intact, and then this produces voice outcomes. In contrast, I argue that resources unleashed by migration change incentives and this intermediary effect shapes voice outcomes. Figure 2.1 (b) visually represents my alternative argument. It should be clear from the discussion so far that my approach emphasizes the “benefit” side of the participation calculus. The incentive component of the model captures the expected benefits from participation.12 While incentives were assumed away in the existing studies, they play a key role in my framework since incentives mediate the impact of resources between exit and voice. In other words, a better way to conceptualize the exit-voice dynamic, I argue, is to consider the net effect of the interplay between resources and incentives. Resources introduced by migration matter but the net effect is defined by how they shape incentives in the end. In the following subsection, I discuss what constitutes participation incentives in a migration context. The scope of condition of migration is important because incentives to participate can be modeled in many equally convincing ways. What is

12It is true that Brady, Scholzman and Verba extensively discuss engagement as a critical factor to explain variance in participation. There are motivations or psychological predispositions that impel citizens to want to participate. Yet it should be noted that they mainly theorize this as “issue engagement” in a narrow sense. Issue engagement is speciﬁc to a particular issue, deriving from having a stake in a particular policy or strong views on a particular issue. In contrast, incentives to participate are a permanent component of my participation model that structurally shapes the level of citizen participation.

44 relevant for my analysis is incentives shaped by forces released by the introduction of external resources and opportunities.

2.3.2 Incentives Matter: The Social Contract of Democracy and the Beneﬁts of Participation

The foundation of representative democracy is a social contract under which citizens elect a government to secure common services and protection in exchange for their support. In this framework, citizens as principals are expected to enforce the representation mechanism through political participation. It follows from the social contract that the extent to which citizens are likely to engage in the political process to do so will depend upon expected gains from such involvement. In other words, citizens who have a greater “stake” in society should participate to a greater extent because they expect higher benefits from political involvement. I define the benefits of such a contract in narrow, instrumental terms. Roughly conceptualized as the utility of citizenship, these benefits refer to services and protection exclusively available to citizens of a country, represented by access to public goods and government services. These are measurable, instrumental, public, and baseline conditions that enhance the well-being of citizens.13

13Psychological—including cultural, ethnic, religious, and emotional—sense of belonging is a powerful human and political consideration, and may explain variation in political engagement in other contexts. For my purposes, however, psychological, especially cultural utility of citizenship is less relevant because it rarely diminishes as a result of migration. The main reason would be that individuals can maintain cultural attachment to their home country and practice cultural activities relatively independent of geographic location or oﬃcial citizenship status. Citizens can enjoy cultural tastes and repertoires relatively autonomous of macroeconomic conditions, government performance, or national security. For these reasons, migration’s impact on the beneﬁts of citizenship should be less prevalent in the cultural domain. Therefore, I limit my discussion

45 It is only natural that studies that look at the citizen-government relationship often focus on government services. Beyond the core functions of the government, such as security and law enforcement, government programs are where citizens feel the presence of the government on a day-to-day basis. Government services are expected in most modern states, but in particular, expectations of government services and the larger public sector are higher in many developing countries from where many international migrants of interest to this study originate (Huntington 1968). Although public goods provision may be limited in these societies due to resource constraints, citizens still expect the state to provide quite a wide range of public goods, including road construction, health services, education, and employment opportunities (Chhibber et al. 2004). Expectations of these benefits determine the level of participation in my framework. What happens when migration enters this picture? Migration provides access to foreign earnings and enables citizens to find substitutions for government functions. In underdeveloped societies, from which many international migrants originate, public goods or publicly provided private goods, such as infrastructure, education, health services and, to an extent, even security, are underprovided. Furthermore, economic inequality tends to be high in these societies, making citizens’ collective action for society-wide improvement for more public goods and better governance difficult (Boix 2003). Therefore, once migrant households receive remittances from abroad, they seek

of utility of citizenship to an instrumental dimension, one that concerns what the government is supposed to provide in exchange for citizens’ membership.

46 private substitutes for services that are usually provided by the government. What has happened in many sending countries is that migrant households opt for private solutions for public services rather than mobilizing for better government responsiveness. The additional household income from remittances can allow, in extreme cases, families to opt for private schools, private health clinics, four-wheel-drive vehicles for unpaved roads, and gated communities with private security.14 Adida and Girod (2011) offer empirical evidence that migrant households turn to “non-state provision” of basic utilities. Using municipal-level data from Mexico between 1995 and 2000, they show that migrant households increased access to clean water and sewage through household-driven private methods. The development of private solutions may have far more political implications considering the high expectations of government functions in developing countries, as discussed above. When these needs are unmet while citizens discover an alternative source of solutions—for instance, migration and remittances—high expectations may lead to high levels of disengagement with the government. These effects are amplified by high levels of migration prospects. It should be noted that many of the large-scale sending countries have emigration lasting more than one generation. When migration ceases to be a temporary measure to ease economic or social problems of the day and turns into a built-in feature of the social landscape, citizens may adapt their social behavior to maximize migration’s potential benefits. Sociological and anthropological studies describe “the culture of migration”

14I do not consider here whether the government or the private sector is better able to provide the services.

47 in sending countries where the younger generation is growing up expecting to migrate (Scalabrini Migration Center 2005, Portes 2010). More systematic evidence in support of this claim is found in the brain drain literature where sending country citizens adjust their career plans and overinvest in education in anticipation of overseas employment (Beine, Docquier & Rapoport 2008). What is relevant for my purposes is that this type of adjustment may have political implications. Individuals who are focused on leaving the country are more likely to have higher discount rates about the future quality of democracy and less likely to be involved in a political life. Considering the fact that there are many more people who would be willing to migrate than those who are actually abroad, this effect, although unobservable, would be substantial.15 Taken together, migration-driven resource inflows and the possibility of exit diminish the importance of the government to the well-being of citizens, and thus reduce the benefits of political participation. It should be pointed out that many of the potential resources discussed in the previous section can be turned into reasons not to engage in politics. Resources and incentives are not only separate parame- ters of political engagement, but in this case resources may be directly responsible for disincentives for participation: now that my life chances may be better improved

15Migration effects can be examined in three ways. First, “strong ties” mechanism is migration’s disengagement effect on citizens belonging to migrant households. This is the most direct mode of influence. Second, “weak ties” involves friends and colleagues. Finally, the most indirect mechanism is the demonstration effect, which is shared by members of a wider society where migration is prevalent. Individuals may adjust their expectations and behavior according to migration prospects and become less invested in local politics even though they are not part of transnational migration network. I focus on the first, familial cases, in this study.

48 by present and future migration, why should I be willing to spend my energy and resources on domestic governance? Thus, migration releases conflicting forces on the cost-benefit calculus of participation. Resources play a double-edge sword role whereby migration may reduce the costs of political engagement but to the extent that such costs decrease due to an influx of migration-generated resources, the same resources are likely to reduce the benefits of political engagement. To be sure, this is not the first project to argue that migration may undermine the relevance of the government and weaken political participation. Survey and aggregate-level evidence from Mexico suggests that citizens affected by migration are less engaged in formal politics while they increase their involvement in civic associations (Goodman & Hiskey 2008, Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010). One interpretation of this trend is that the current form of migration, which accompanies remittance transfers and durable transnational ties, engenders “exit without leaving” for those who are left behind, by causing them to distance themselves from institutional politics and making them invest more in social networks that will enable their own departure in the future (Goodman & Hiskey 2008). In the context of migration, resources and incentives are not mutually independent determinants of participation. Rather, the latter is endogenous to the former for the reasons I discussed so far. This makes participation under migration theoretically distinct. To put it differently, if conventional approaches to variation in participation highlight the ability of citizens, migration sheds light on a situation where the willingness of citizens to engage with politics is the focus of the analysis.

49 2.3.3 Voice in a Place of Exit: The Impact on Democratic Accountability

Demand for accountable government directly captures the extent to which citizens are invested in and willing to enforce the social contract of democracy. Thus, I examine the extent to which citizens electorally reward or punish the incumbent government for its performance under different levels of migration. Underlying concerns about the effectiveness of electoral accountability is the democratic theory that citizens should be able to steer their government to choose best policies in the interest of the public. As a mutually interdependent relationship, citizens and the government enter into a contract where citizens pay dues—taxes, loyalty, and in some countries, conscription—and the government provide a broad array of services. In this framework, citizens are supposed to enforce representation using a variety of forms of political participation. Besides the primary mode of voting, citizens make their opinions known to the government by organizing advocacy groups, attending demonstrations or protests, contacting government officials, and making financial contributions. Yet elections play a prominent role in exercising accountability by directly rewarding and punishing politicians unlike any other forms of participation.16

16Non-electoral forms of participation are more visible and have been strong in advocating for migrants’ rights and interests. Political parties have been formed to represent the sectoral interest of migrants; existing parties compete for the support of migrant voters or their family members left behind; transnational ties whose well-known examples are hometown associations organized tightly around narrowly deﬁned geographic areas. As a response, sending-country governments have instituted various policy measures to advance the interests of migrants and migrant households, including previously discussed overseas absentee voting. The well-known state apparatus of the Philippines to manage the country’s labor export has developed mainly as a result of strong advocacy movement to project its overseas workers (Agunias & Ruiz 2007). Yet despite

50 Theoretical debates continue as to whether elections primarily serve as a selection mechanism for future representatives or an accountability-enforcement mechanism for incumbents. One of the key challenges to accountability theory is that, due to the complex functions of modern government, controlling politicians is highly costly due to an immense information asymmetry between voters and politicians. I take a moderate approach: even when one believes that elections primarily serve the function of selecting good policies or politicians, as prospective voting theory suggests, this forward-looking consideration still involves information about past performance (Duch & Stevenson 2006). Being strategic actors in an elementary sense, politicians learn the probability of electoral punishment for poor performance from the extent of electoral sanctions of the past, and decide accordingly to what extent they would deviate from their responsibility (Fearon 1999). Empirically, the effectiveness of elections as a mechanism to induce good representation is also open to debate. Students of state building and good governance argue that electoral competition and opposition presence improves government performance and decreases corruption by making politicians more responsive to voter preferences (Geddes 1994, Grzymala-Busse 2007). When elections are competitive and challengers have real opportunities to win office, incumbents will be motivated to prove their competence in the management of public affairs and rein in corruption. Others are more skeptical, arguing that electoral competition does not produce responsive government (Cleary 2007).

high hopes, migrants’ advocacy has rarely spilled over into general reform of government. In general, there may be a voice for migrants, but it is not yet a voice for the society at large.

51 This study is not primarily concerned with the effectiveness of elections as an institution in inducing good government. Rather, I use the intensity with which citizens exercise their power to enforce representation as an indicator of the strength of citizen-government relationship. I advocate that accountability is not only a definition of representative democracy, but can be a measure of the quality of democracy in an empirical sense (Cheibub & Przeworski 1999). After all, democracy is only as good as the extent to which individual citizens make it work. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that voters do not always punish or reward elected officials for their performance at the ballot box. The extensive literature on the connection between an incumbent’s performance and electoral outcomes shows that, beyond the general observation that performance matters for the incumbent’s survival (Key 1966, Ferejohn 1986), electoral accountability often fails to stand up to empirical scrutiny (Cheibub & Przeworski 1999, Fearon 1999, Achen & Bartels 2004). Evidence of retrospective voting is quite strong for economic performance in US national and state electoral outcomes (Erikson 1989), yet the results are mixed in US local elections as well as in cross-national settings (Lewis-Beck & Stegmaier 2000, Duch & Stevenson 2008). How recent scholarship on retrospective voting has dealt with these problems offers some insight into how we may approach migration’s impact on accountability. Scholars who study the relationship between government performance and electoral outcomes have converged onto a more nuanced, conditional understanding that the

52 magnitude of electoral sanctions varies by voter characteristics, information availability, and institutional contexts.17 For voter characteristics, studies have found that partisanship has an unmediated effect on how voters assess the incumbent in US local elections (Oliver & Ha 2007) while recent research highlights the conditional effect of partisan bias in attributing blame when the government fails to response to natural disasters (Malhotra & Kuo 2008) or in applying the retrospective evaluations of the national economic conditions to vote choice (Evans & Andersen 2006). The magnitude of electoral accountability also depends upon the amount and type of information that voters have about incumbents’ performance in office. After all, whether people do in fact vote retrospectively hinges upon their knowledge about changes in public life that an incumbent officeholder oversees. In their work on the effect of education performance on school board elections, Berry and Howell (2007) explain the uneven strength of electoral rewards or sanctions for US local school board officials by the uneven information availability about student learning outcomes in different election cycles. The literature also emphasizes that differences in political environments explain variations in observed patterns of retrospective voting. Voters may adjust their evaluations according to whether job responsibilities are clearly defined or to what extent the incumbent possesses control over the process. Scholars who examine the impact of fiscal performance on the incumbent party’s election results in American states find that voters respond to fiscal policy, considering whether the government

17See, for example, Duch and Stevenson (2008) .

53 was unified or divided and also taking into account the fiscal reputation of the party in power (Lowry, Alt & Ferree 1998). What the retrospective voting literature suggests is that the extent to which voters hold the government accountable depends significantly on the context, especially on how voters define their relationship with the government. This allows us to use the magnitude of retrospective voting to understand citizen behavior in a high-migration setting. In the next section, I present my overall argument with the three theoretical building blocks I discussed so far.

2.4 The Argument

In the preceding sections, I discussed a simple model of participation that centers on the costs and benefits of participation, and dovetailed it with a social contract of democracy under which citizens and the government are brought together. I then draw from the retrospective voting literature where the context of voting plays an important role in determining the citizen-government linkage. Based on these theoretical discussions, I now present my own argument about the political impact of migration. The discussion proceeds in three steps. I begin with an observation that migration creates external resources and opportunities. Remittances are substantial and stable economic resources for citizens. The economic wealth and its benefits improve their life significantly and do so outside the influence of the government. Simultaneously, the gains are magnified by the prolonged migration cycle in the community. This implies that citizens see their life less affected by the successes and failures of government.

54 Figure 2.2: Migration and Democratic Accountability

The rise of private solutions for many government functions, including education, health care, and security leads to the second step of my argument. Remittance wealth and the possibility of a life abroad make the social contract of democracy less relevant for citizens. It follows from this that they come to expect fewer benefits from participating in the governing process. In an elementary sense of the cost- benefit consideration of participation, citizens in a high-migration setting may find that net benefits of political engagement are decreasing as the utility of the social

55 contract is declining.18 To put it differently, citizens will be less likely to get involved in politics when they have a less stake in effective representation. These forces lead to the final stage of the political impact of migration: lower demand for democratic accountability. Remember that accountability is based on the representative notion of government. Democratic accountability matters to the extent that such a contract between citizens and the government is substantively meaningful. From citizens’ point of view, the extent to which they are willing to invest resources to ensure that the government fulfills its promises hinges on the perceived benefits of that contract. In a high-migration environment where citizens may conclude that government performance is less important to their individual well- being, they have fewer incentives to ensure accountability from the government. In consequence, they are less willing to hold the government accountable. The structure of the argument is summarized in Figure 2.2. The final step warrants further discussion because it is the most important component of the overall argument and it generates empirical implications that will be tested in Chapter Five. In a narrow sense, I argue that levels of migration shape the magnitude of electoral accountability. In places where migration is low, voters

18In terms of the collective action problem, current flows of remittances and migration prospects may further reduce the benefits of political engagement because citizens may be able to pay for special treatment from the government without initiating collection action for systemic solutions. The cost of coordination is assumed to remain unaffected by migration. One counter argument would be that the disengagement of other migrants may subsequently increase the cost of participation. This is a probable situation but in empirical settings could be manipulated accordingly. Theoretically, whether and to what extent migration further raises coordination costs for those who left behind does not change the premise of the argument. If anything, it merely emphasizes the negative net effect of migration for citizen engagement in politics of the home country.

56 Figure 2.3: Migration and Citizens’ Willingness to Ensure Accountability

are more likely to hold politicians accountable for their performance in office. This is because citizens recognize that, for better or worse, their individual well-being is intimately influenced by the government. This translates into a positive relationship between the incumbent’s performance and electoral fortunes. In contrast, in high migration places, incumbent performance and electoral fortunes should have negative or no significant relationship. For reasons discussed above, citizens see fewer benefits of ensuring democratic accountability from the government. The result is a weak relationship between government performance and electoral sanctions. This argument is visually illustrated in Figure 2.3.19

19As discussed in Chapter One, I discuss migration’s political impact mainly by looking at on how many have migrated. This differs from other approaches that emphasize the characteristics of the migrants, specifically “who leaves, for where, when, and why?” (Kapur 2010a). I agree that we should expect migration’s impact to be different depending on many factors. Citizens differ in their predispositions and capacities to engage in politics and who does migration remove most may have implications for the levels and types of migration effect. The political and economic

57 2.5 Theoretical Implications

In this section, I elaborate on the broad theoretical implications of my argument by discussing its relationship with the “safety valve” account. Political science scholarship offers rich, if not systematic, precedents for a claim that migration makes citizens disinterested in politics and pulls them away from the governing process. Migration has long been considered to defuse pressure on the government facing political and economic challenges. At the elite level, migration removes dissidents and potential political challengers. At the mass level, it provides an exit alternative should the masses find the state of affairs, e.g., high employment conditions, unsatis- fying. According to this line of reasoning, migration helps to maintain the status quo or facilitates gradual change without altering the fundamental political structure or invoking violent conflicts in society. Scholars have argued that migration contributes to the stability and survival of authoritarian regimes in places like Cuba, Zimbabwe and the former Soviet Union (Hirschman 1978).20 In this tradition, exit ultimately

institutions of the destination country may shape the terms and contents of the interaction between migrants and their home communities. Timing of mass migration could be critical: “exit during crisis” may have greater consequences than otherwise. Finally, political exiles are likely to engage their home country diﬀerently from economic migrants. Nonetheless, I exclude qualitative treatment mainly due to the lack of reliable data at the subnational level.

20This hypothesis is presented in various forms. Examples from the nineteenth centuries include “shovelling out paupers” of European emigration to the New World (Howells 2003) and the promotion of the American frontier as a safety valve for discontented urban surplus labor in the United States (Turner 1920). In recent decades, mass exodus out of Cuba has been frequently linked to the regime’s stability. See Kapur (2010a) for a review.

58 undermines voice. I extend this classical safety valve argument in three important ways. First, I reconstruct the safety valve mechanism with the resource factor. Today’s migration establishes immediate feedback in the form of remittances and migrant networks. These new channels of exchange do not necessarily refute the old exit-vs.- voice argument. In contrast, I argue that these new forms of resources strengthen the defusing role of migration. If the classic version emphasizes that migration removes political troubles by removing unhappy citizens, the new version considers that migration “internally displaces” discontents by providing access to external resources and opportunities. The rise of remittances and the expansion of transnational migration ties transform the classical safety valve mechanism into “exit without leaving” (Goodman & Hiskey 2008). Second, I provide a micro-level, citizen-centered mechanism for the safety valve argument. Here it should be pointed out that the classical accounts tend to approach migration from the state perspective. The safety valve argument has frequently presented migration as a deliberate strategy by the state to defuse diﬃcult domestic situations. The states and politicians intentionally take advantage of migration to remove political opposition and distract citizens from economic problems. The state’s reliance on migration as a solution to domestic economic trouble may be less conscious than getting rid of dissidents, but out-migration or overseas employment certainly aﬀord the government the luxury of not having to execute reforms.21

21In the midst of economic crisis in Jamaica during the 1970s, the disgruntled professional and managerial middle class left the country in droves. It was not probably the result of a deliberate

59 It should be noted that I am less interested in the intentionality of the state involvement in migration. Deliberate government attempts to encourage migration and the ﬂows of remittances only support my claim that citizens do disengage from politics when they are less tied to government functions and services. In the research tradition of the “safety valve” hypothesis, the state takes a central stage while citizen behavior is frequently treated as endogenous to the state action. However, given the interactive nature of politics of migration, the oversight of citizens’ agency is problematic. The state and citizens make decisions responding to each other’s decision. The state can either crack down or accommodate when citizens make demands while citizens can either exit the country or voice their opinions in a political way (Clark, Golder & Golder 2007). What I attempt to do is to examine the migration process from citizens’ points of view and highlight the mechanism that will eventually serve as a ground for government decisions to encourage or discourage further emigration. This is also more consistent with empirical patterns where most large-scale migration begins as private eﬀorts in search of a better life and later the state develops policies for intervention.22

government policy, but then Prime Minister Michael Manley famously announced to the restive public that “We have ﬁve ﬂights to Miami every day” (Levitt 2005).

22Although the Philippine state is frequently discussed as an example of active government involvement in labor export process, labor migration out of the Philippines was initiated by private citizens during early days (Rother 2009).

60 In broad perspective, this study is a corrective to the most recent wave of migration research. It should be obvious from the discussion so far that there have been two major waves of political science scholarship on the political impact of international migration. The ﬁrst generation of migration research considered exit and voice as mutually exclusive as a mode of political action. The analogy of a safety valve was that exit defuses pressure for voice and thus helps to maintain the status quo. The second generation argument, an empowerment view discussed earlier, drew attention to the connection between exit and voice. From this perspective, the distinction between “those who have left” and ”those left behind” is not as rigid as once thought; and those left behind are indeed part of migrant networks. This view suggests that exit can promote voice through its resources and transnational networks. In contrast, my argument goes back to the older view but with a newly conceived theoretical framework.

2.6 Conclusion

My argument shares with the current views an insight that exit and voice are intrinsically linked in today’s international migration, but supports an older observation that migration could hinder political improvement. The key consideration, I argue, is to move away from the novelty of migration-induced resources and transnational ties and to focus on the incentives faced by citizens to exercise their political power to ensure good representation. The theory developed in this chapter suggests a few implications for the way we think about globalization, government performance and citizen empowerment in

61 the developing world. First, the theory developed here draws attention to the limits of resources as a solution for challenges to democracy in developing countries. While I accept the view that more resources for citizens generally check the misbehavior of a politician, resources need to be supported by an incentive to translate them into political action. Migration highlights a situation where incentives may trump resources for citizen participation. Extant research on citizen participation in developing countries tends to assume that once citizens obtain more resources and political independence, their participation in politics will automatically increase. The contractual relationship between citizens and the government is assumed away, without questioning if this is the only polity citizens would want to invest in politically. Again, I emphasize that migration decouples this relationship and shows what would happen if citizens withdraw from the home country politics. Second, more resources are not an unmitigated blessing. International migration may provide resources and knowledge that can strength citizens’ present and future political power. Yet the same resources may trigger a complex web of incentive effects, resulting in not only offsetting the very potential but undercutting the entire effort. In this sense, migration has a strong parallel to the debate on the impact of foreign aid and natural resource wealth, where the infusion of external resources unleashes conflicting forces with regard to pro- and anti- status quo (Dunning 2008, Rajan & Subramanian 2007, Ross 2001). Likewise, the democratic benefits of external resources and networks, even though they are private-to-private transactions in nature, should be approached with caution.

62 In the following three chapters, I turn to empirical tests of the hypotheses developed here. Chapter Three will examine variance in political participation attributable to migration as a test of existing arguments about the political impact of migration. Chapter Four will then show that migration reduces the importance of the social contract of democracy, a reason not to actively engage in the political process. The aggregate manifestation of this micro-level eﬀect will be presented in Chapter Five in a form of retrospective voting.

63 CHAPTER 3

MORE RESOURCES, MORE VOICE? THE IMPACT OF

MIGRATION ON ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION IN

THE PHILIPPINES

3.1 Introduction

Do external resources and ideas promote citizen participation? In the development of a theory of migration-induced political disengagement in Chapter Two, I argued that contemporary international migration and remittances undermine citizens’ involvement in the political process by reducing incentives to hold the government accountable for its performance. I presented this argument as a challenge to the existing view that citizens supported by remittances and exposed to new ideas via migration will have greater voice, that is, that international migration spreads and strengthens democracy around the world. Recent studies pay increasing attention to the domestic consequences of international migration for developing countries (Kapur 2010a, Levitt 2001, Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010). With the number of migrants reaching 215.8 million and remittances $440 billion worldwide in the ﬁrst decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century (World Bank

64 2011), an emerging literature advocates that migration and remittances act as agents of political change in origin countries (Kapur 2010a, Levitt 2001, Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010). Two channels of influence have been proposed, especially with a focus on the migration-dependent population—those staying behind but benefitting from and relying on remittance inflows. The most prominent mechanism suggested in the literature is migrant remittances, which refers to direct money transfers from migrants to their families. Re- mittances to developing countries reached $308 billion in 2009 and in some countries they account for more than 10% of annual GDP (Dilip Ratha & Silwal 2009). Since remittances are private transfers and undeniably enhance the material well-being of the recipient household (World Bank 2006), scholars argue that this will translate into political power of ordinary citizens. Specifically, this “financial remittances” claim predicts that, since money transfers from migrants increase the household income, migration reduces the cost of political participation for their families. Implicit is the assumption that a constraint on voice is the lack of resources. In addition to external funds, international migration also facilitates the import of new ideas and innovations. In the realm of political knowledge and experience, the “social remittances” argument emphasizes non-monetary transmissions channeled through migrant networks. It claims that migrants to well-established democracies adopt and spread democratic beliefs and practices back to their home societies (de la Garza & Yetim 2003, Levitt 2001, Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010). This hypothesis highlights the global dimension in political learning at the mass level and suggests

65 that integration with the world economy complements and even substitutes for home- grown political socialization. The social remittances model argues that citizens of migrant family members, even though they may stay behind, should exhibit higher levels of political engagement because they get exposed to democratic ideas and values through migrant networks. In this chapter, I test implications of the current view for electoral participation using survey data from the Philippines. In what follows, I first discuss the theoretical frameworks underlying the current view and draw explicit testable hypotheses. This is an improvement on previous research in both theoretical and empirical terms. To ascertain whether mobility affects the electoral channel through which citizens engage with the government in a democracy, I examine variance in voter turnout, volunteering in campaign and election administration, and following campaign news in the media across the household-level migration status. To preview my findings, migration is not critical for understanding electoral participation. In contrast to the financial remittances model, I find no evidence that members of migrant households are more likely to turn out to vote, volunteer in various electoral activities, or follow campaign news. Likewise, I fail to find evidence to support the prediction that ties to a democratic host country lead family members to be more active in these three areas of electoral participation. The findings suggest that international migration does not, at least in the Philip- pine context, cause more active citizen participation in politics. Despite additional

66 ﬁnancial resources and political knowledge, citizens do not appear to voice their opinions more than those without such resources. This strongly challenges the resource- centered approach to the domestic impact of migration. The remainder of this chapter proceeds as follows. The next section discusses the existing arguments about the impact of migration on citizens’ participation and examines their limitations. It then presents testable hypotheses. The following two sections describe research design and data, and present the estimation results. The ﬁnal section concludes.

3.2 The Impact of Exit on Voice

Two assumptions about the nature of contemporary migration underlie the argument that migration promotes political change in the origin country. The first concerns migrants’ continuing relationship with their origin country. In attempting to explain the new exit-voice dynamic, the literature begins with the basic premise that contemporary migration creates reverse flows of information and resources for the origin country. Migration today is not a one-time exit, but an expansion of family networks on a global scale. As such, the inflows of external funds and information are a built-in feature of current migration. Migration has long been considered to defuse popular pressure on the government by serving as a “safety valve” (Hirschman 1986). The exit of opposition leaders or disgruntled members of the public helps to maintain the status quo without altering the fundamental political structure or invoking violent conflicts in society. This premise was based on the idea that those who have left do

67 not maintain any meaningful ties with their homeland. Therefore, this earlier argument concluded, the feedback between exit and voice is only negative. The presence of transnational family ties and remittances inflows, however, changes this relationship fundamentally. Now there is a possibility of positive feedback where exit affects voice. The second assumption is that current migration provides opportunities for poor or underprivileged classes to a greater extent than ever before. This claim is driven by historical observations that, at least compared to the immediate years of the post-World War II period, today’s migrants represent a far more inclusive group of developing-country citizens (Hatton & Williamson 2005, Portes 1999). By contrast, the global diffusion of nationalism and socialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was mostly channeled through colonial elites who had spent considerable time in the imperial metropoles of Europe. With more and more non-elites included in the migrant stock, the situation is more conducive to the flow of ideas at the mass public level. Thus, the argument goes, migration facilitates a new international- domestic linkage where ordinary citizens, not just traditional elites, may benefit from knowledge transfers and thus become empowered to influence the politics of their home country.1

1In its original conception, social remittances are considered as value-neutral so that their eﬀect could be positive and negative (Levitt 1998). Nonetheless, the transnationalism literature in general implicitly suggests that this international connectivity will result in positive changes in the sending communities (Levitt 1998, Levitt 2001). Some scholars within migration studies counterargue that transnational political engagement is highly selective and contingent on the host country context, and carries a risk of reproducing pre-migration power relations (Waldinger & Fitzgerald 2004, Waldinger 2008). The theoretical framework of this dissertation intends to reclaim the original concept of social remittances without any normative baggage.

68 In short, the historical conditions of current international migration are conducive to the positive feedback between exit and voice. Based on these assumptions, the literature proposes two channels for migration’s influence. In the first, financial remittances, the transfer of external funds, plays a prominent role. By definition, remittances increase the economic resources of the household, which can be appro- priated for political purposes. Remittances are not a byproduct of labor mobility, but one of the major goals of migration. Official migrant remittances are now at a record high, estimated at $415 billion per year, and they exceed traditionally important international financial flows such as official development assistance and foreign direct investment in many labor- exporting countries (International Organization for Migration 2010). Moreover, for a number of countries like Haiti, El Salvador, and the Philippines, remittances constitute more than 10% of GDP.2 Remittances first and foremost expand the size of household economic resources. There is extensive empirical evidence that remittances reduce poverty, smooth con- sumption in response to income shocks, increase investment in human capital, and promote entrepreneurial activities (Adams & Page 2005, Beine, Docquier & Rapoport 2008, Durand, Parrado & Massey 1996, Faini 2007, World Bank 2006, Yang & Martinez 2005, Yang & Choi 2007).

2IMF defines remittances as “household income from foreign economies arising mainly from the temporary or permanent movement of people to those economies” including cash and noncash items (2009). Remittances are conventionally measured by combining officially recorded workers’ remittances, compensation of employees, and migrant transfers in the balance of payments statistics. The true extent of remittances flowing through “informal” channels such as cash carried in person or in-kind transfers, although estimated to be substantial, is unknown.

69 If remittance inflows mean more money, it is only a short step to argue that they produce more resources for political participation. Political activity requires resources and the literature on participation has long noted that among money, time and civic skills, financial resources tend to be critical to citizens’ involvement in politics (Brady, Verba & Schlozman 1995). As such, the rise in household income increases money available for political participation. In addition, since money is fungible, it can be invested in education or the development of other types of organizational skills. Therefore, to the extent that financial resources are critical to the involvement of citizens in the governing process, remittances should contribute to an increase in participation.3 Despite these insights, the problem with the financial remittances model is that its focus on resources can undermine its theoretical purchase. Resources are a powerful determinant of citizens’ political involvement, yet it is important to be reminded that resources only make it easier for a citizen who is predisposed to take part in political participation. Furthermore, the level of participation may not be the source of concern in the context of this study since in many new and less established democracies, the level of participation is already comparably high (Pintor & Gratschew 2002). Common problems, such as vote buying or clientelism, do not indicate a lack of participation. Rather, they highlight a problem as to how citizens use their votes and

3The macroeconomic impact of remittances is a separate topic, although the patterns are also consistent with the observation that migration has a pro-status quo bias. Recent studies have found that remittances insulate the recipient country from ﬁnancial crises (Esteves & Khoudour- Casteras 2009) and allow its government to maintain monetary policy autonomy, for instance, adopting ﬁxed exchange rates in an international environment where such policy moves are unlikely to be sustainable otherwise (Singer 2010).

70 exercise their rights in the electoral process. Citizens of developing countries may be very much inclined to voice their opinions because they have high aspirations and expectations of modern democracy. As Huntington pointed out (1968), social and economic changes in the developing world that cause increases in literacy and education, mass communication, and urbanization raise political demands that the society may not be able to satisfy. As social frustration with the “gap” between new levels of aspirations and the reality grows, citizens turn to politics for a rapid change. Second, recent studies on migration emphasize that migration spreads democratic values and behaviors to the sending country. The literature on migrant transnationalism (Glick-Schiller, Basch & Blanc 1995, Levitt 2001, Levitt & Schiller 2004) highlights that contemporary migrants maintain close ties with their country of origin and continue to participate in various aspects of its political, economic, and social life. They pay special attention to non-monetary ﬂows of information, ideas, beliefs, preferences, and skills that are transmitted through return visits, phone calls, the internet, and other forms of communication. These are “social remittances,” as opposed to ﬁnancial remittances, which may be unobservable but as important as monetary contributions because they may change underlying political attitudes. Through the durable ties, migrants communicate to their family members that, for example, politicians are held accountable, women enjoy a higher social status, and lines are shorter at city halls in the host country, and encourage them to pursue “reforms” back home (Levitt 2001, p.63). Drawing on evidence primarily from the migration from Latin America to US, this literature suggests that migrants to a well-established democracy are immersed in a

71 democratic environment where they learn, adopt, and reinforce democratic values, orientations, skills, and commitments. It also claims that migrants simultaneously and subsequently share these attitudes with their kin in the country of origin through various channels. Survey evidence from Mexico indicates that respondents in migrant networks—return migrants, friends, and family of migrants, and residents of a high- migration community—show higher levels of tolerance, critical attitudes toward the government, and participation in civic affairs (Camp 2003, de la Garza & Yetim 2003, Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010). According to these findings, current migration may be a new type of civic education that enlightens citizens of sending countries to democratic principles and empowers them to demand change. The democratic diffusion hypothesis is vulnerable to two specific objections. First, the notion that the idea of democracy is so novel to many international migrants that they develop a measurable understanding and appreciation of democratic principles only after they arrive in the host country is problematic. Democracy in the twenty-first century enjoys normative superiority, with cross-national survey evidence showing that there is almost a universal endorsement of democracy around the world today (Inglehart 2003)—democratic diffusion in this sense has already occurred. Second, existing studies use data that exclude migration to non-democratic destinations, which may misattribute democratic effect. Previous findings in support of the claim that migration spreads democratic attitudes primarily draw evidence from Latin America where most migrants move to the US and Canada (Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010). But unless we compare households with migrants in a democracy to

72 those with ties to a dictatorship, it is difficult to conclude that an observed difference in political behavior can be attributed to freedom or democratic norms migrants sup- posedly experience at their destination. Rather, what migrants feel impressed with may be some unobservable characteristics of the host country—clean streets, safe neighborhood, and better garbage collection, all of which are not inherent properties of democracy but commonly observed in wealthy, democratic, and labor-importing countries. Ignoring the possibility that current studies conflate freedom and governance runs the risk of misattributing the source of “new” attitudes. If contact with a well-established democracy foster democratic learning, should contact with a well-functioning dictatorship—given the characteristics associated with being a large-scale labor importer—likewise promote support for authoritarianism? To address this problem, we need a study that include migration-induced contacts with both democracy and authoritarianism.

3.3 Migration and Electoral Participation

In this chapter, I focus on electoral participation. The literature normally includes turnout, campaign contributions, volunteering for campaign, working as a poll worker for election administration, or consuming election news. I do not discuss lobbying in this study. While I fully concede that lobbying is a powerful mode of participation in a modern democracy, there is no theoretical reason to assume that the participation mechanism should be exclusively lobbying and bypass electoral channels.4 Direct

4Lobbying is another important topic for migration research. Although the expansion of overseas voting across the countries indicate that governments have come to recognize the political importance of overseas voters (Ellis et al. 2007), the extent to which migrants and, by extension, their

73 action, such as contacting public officials and attending protests, is likewise outside the scope of this study. I focus on members of migrant households. The focus on household members should be self-evident since migrant household members are direct recipients of financial remittances and part of transnational migration networks through which social remittances get channeled. Therefore, participation effect of migration should be observed among family members of migrants. The existing literature provides two testable implications regarding electoral participation. First, if resources are the major constraint on active participation, in line with the the financial remittances model, citizens who are financially benefited by migration should have higher levels of electoral participation.

H1: Migrant household members should have higher levels of electoral participation than non-migrant household members.

Second, citizens who have family members working in a democracy may get exposed to democratic values and practices. Consequently, they become more actively involved in the political process. To test the claim that migration transmits democratic values to the country of origin, I use households with migrants in a dictatorship as a control group. This is because we need to compare responses among migrant

households hold clearly diﬀerentiated “sectoral interests” from the rest of the public is less clear. In the Philippines, Migrante International, the most well-known non-government migrant advocacy group, participated in the party-list election in 2004 but failed to gained a seat. They did not participate in the subsequent 2007 election and the Commission on Elections controversially ruled the group unqualiﬁed to contest for the 2010 election.

74 households to control for unobservable characteristics associated with being a migrant household. Migrant households may share certain orientations—ambitions, propensity for risk-taking, and other unobservable characteristics—that distinguish them from non-migrant households. Thus, migrant and non-migrant households may be fundamentally diﬀerent when it comes to electoral participation. For this reasons, I analyze variation between household members with contacts with a democracy and those with a dictatorship.

H2: Respondents from migrant households with family members in democracies should have higher levels of electoral participation than respondents from migrant households with family members in authoritarian countries.

It is important to note that the distinction between democracy and dictatorship at the destination is only important to H2. For H1, I do not take into account destination characteristics. I will discuss in detail the measurement related to migration in the following section.

3.4 Data and Measures

To test both hypotheses, I use survey data from the Philippines. My dataset combines 2002, 2003, and 2007 rounds of the Social Weather Survey (SWS), which is a quarterly survey designed and administered by the Social Weather Stations based in Manila. The nationally-representative data set contains responses from voting-age Filipinos and has questions about the migrant status of household members. My dataset has 3,600 respondents and 12% of the sample currently has family members abroad. As discussed in Chapter One, the prevalence of migration and importance of remittances to its national economy makes the Philippines an appropriate setting for 75 studying the impact of migration. The country also provides analytical leverage to test the social remittance hypothesis because because it oﬀers variation in the regime type of destination countries. I take advantage of the fact that the Philippines sends migrants to both democratic and authoritarian countries. Slightly more than half of overseas Filipinos reside in Europe, Americas, and Oceania (Philippines Overseas Employment Administration 2006). Table 3.1 presents the distribution of overseas Filipinos by host countries.

Table 3.1: Overseas Filipino Stock

Country Migrants Country Migrants 1 United States 2,723,182 16 Germany 55,628 2 Saudi Arabia 994,377 17 Guam 48,268 3 Canada 404,966 18 Korea 47,150 4 Japan 353,253 19 Israel 37,155 5 Malaysia 352,650 20 Bahrain 36,718 6 Seabased Workers 229,002 21 Lebanon 34,437 7 Australia 215,494 22 France 32,085 8 UAE 205,967 23 Austria 25,973 9 Hong Kong 197,345 24 Spain 25,292 10 Taiwan 160,672 25 Greece 25,146 11 Italy 138,461 26 Brunei 23,488 12 Singapore 136,489 27 Oman 20,461 13 United Kingdom 116,322 28 The Northern Mariana Islands 19,291 14 Kuwait 91,789 29 Macau 18,447 15 Qatar 58,358 30 New Zealand 17,609 Source: Philippines Overseas Employment Administration 2006.

By contrast, annual ﬂows present a diﬀerent pattern. Only about 20% of new Filipino migrant workers move to wealthy democracies. In 2007, its top destination

76 for newly hired workers was Saudi Arabia (19.8%) followed by the United Arab Emirates (12.1%). Table 3.2 show the top 30 destinations of newly hired Filipino migrants. For my own dataset, among migrant households, 69.8% of migrants are working in a democratic country while 30.3% are in an authoritarian country.

Table 3.2: Destinations of Filipino Migrant Workers

2005 2006 Destination new hires percentage share new hires percentage share Saudi Arabia 194,350 26.2 223,459 28.4 UAE 82,039 11.1 99,212 12.6 Hong Kong 98,693 13.3 96,929 12.3 Kuwait 40,306 5.4 47,917 6.1 Qatar 31,421 4.2 45,795 5.8 Taiwan 46,737 6.3 39,025 5 Singapore 28,152 3.8 28,369 3.6 Italy 21,267 2.9 25,413 3.2 UK 16,930 2.3 16,925 2.1 Korea 9,975 1.3 13,984 1.8 Other Destinations 170,762 23.1 151,041 19.2 Landbased Total 740,632 100 151,041 100 Source: Philippines Overseas Employment Administration 2006.

To measure electoral participation I use three measures from the SWS survey. First, I study voter turnout in the 2001, 2004, and 2007 national elections. The dependent variable Turnout is coded 1 for “Yes” and 0 for “No” based on a self- reported response to the question, “Did you vote in the national elections?”5 For

5To be precise, the question on the 2001 election was asked in 2004 and 2007 rounds while the question on the 2004 election was asked in 2007.

77 the 2007 election, since the 2007 survey was conducted prior to the election date, the question asked whether the respondent was going to vote. Responses run from “Definitely not” and “probably vote” to “surely vote.” To address social desirability bias (Silver, Anderson & Abramson 1986), I only code 1 for responses that indicate they will surely vote in the coming election and 0 for otherwise. The original survey item is presented in the data appendix. Second, I assess the extent of non-voting electoral activity, which includes not only campaign work but volunteering for election administration as an election-day poll worker. The 2007 SWS survey contains the question, “Which among the following activities do you plan to undertake in the coming May 2007 elections?” The response categories include “Put up posters for candidates,” “Attend rallies,” “Monitor ballot counting,” and other election-related activities that require donating time and efforts but exclude voting. I create a binary indicator variable coded 1 for mentioning any volunteer activities and 0 for otherwise. The original survey item is presented in the appendix. Electoral participation other than voting certainly require resources. They cost money, time, and effort, all of which can be made available to a greater extent by remittance income. The non-monetary dimension of volunteer activity, such as time and effort, can be further enhanced by social remittances as democratic values and norms would encourage citizens to contribute to the electoral process. Note that campaign contributions is not part of the responses. Campaign contributions, or “checkbook participation” (Verba, Schlozman & Brady 1995), are not considered in my analysis due to data limitations, but there is cross-national and anecdotal evidence that remittances flow into political campaigns. O’Mahony (2008)

78 finds an increase in remittance inflows during the election year in developing countries using data between 1995 and 2000. Within the Philippines, overseas migrants are known to make campaign contributions although no systematic evidence exists.6 Nevertheless, it should be noted that these accounts emphasize the decision of migrants to get involved in the campaigns from overseas. By contrast, the focus of my study is the behavior of family members who receive remittances from overseas. For the third dependent variable, I analyze the extent to which the respondent seeks political information about the coming election. Informed citizens are important in a functioning and stable democracy. Yet strong empirical evidence has been presented that voters are surprisingly ignorant of political issues (Campbell, Con- verse, Miller & Stokes 1960). Theoretical responses to the coexistence of the public’s political ignorance and a functioning democratic system (in the US) has included a heuristics theory whereby voters use a variety of information cues to make decisions in a low-information environment (Popkin 1991). For this analysis, I approach voter information from a somewhat different angle and consider the level of voter information as an endogenous variable determined by the voter’s financial and cognitive resources. The 2007 SWS survey contains a question “Please say if you followed the reports on preparations of politicians for the coming elections ...?” Respondents choose from five-scale response categories from “Didn’t know” to “Very closely.” In a similar fashion to the campaign work measure, I create a binary indicator variable

6Interview with a policy analyst, Manila, 2009.

79 coded 1 for response “Very closely” and 0 for otherwise. The original survey item is also presented in the appendix. For the test of the financial remittances argument, the independent variable of interest is a binary indicator variable: whether respondents belong to a household that has a family member currently working abroad. Note that I take a qualitative approach to migration, that is, not taking into consideration quantitative information about various migration outcomes—the amount of remittances, the number of migrants in a single household, the legal status of migrants, or the duration of migration. Most importantly, I make an assumption that migrant households are in a clear financial advantage compared to non-migrant households and that the difference is qualitatively distinct. Including detailed information about remittances and other migration characteristics would surely increase the inferential quality of this study. However, due to data limitations, it is beyond the scope of this study and is not attempted here.7 Since the social remittances argument hinges on contacts with democracy, my second independent variable is a binary indicator variable coded 1 if a respondent belongs to a household with a family member currently working in a democratic

7Relevant to the test of the social remittances model, I use information only about whether a respondent has a current migrant family member and exclude whether the respondent or a family member is a return migrant. This decision was made after considering the possible adverse selection of return migrants as carriers of information. It is possible that those migrants who are better adjusted to their host environment—thus in possession of better knowledge and influence—are less likely to return home. This is empirically confirmed by my own statistical analysis and was also reported in previous works on migration (Perez-Armendariz & Crow 2010). Thus, this study does not address the cases of return migrants but instead focuses on the spread of knowledge and attitudes affecting members of migrant households. This is, to an extent, a harder test since it examines not only the adoption of new attitudes but their spread in the home society.

80 country and 0 if in an authoritarian country. The variable is coded missing when a respondent’s household has no current migrant. As discussed earlier, setting an authoritarian host country as a reference category has an advantage in controlling unobservable household characteristics that are correlated with both migration and political attitudes. To code the regime type of the host country, I create a dummy variable coded 1 if the Polity IV score is greater than 0 and 0 if otherwise. The scores are one-year lagged for the 2004 and 2007 surveys respectively.8 In my sample, 11.8% of respondents have a family member living abroad. Among them, 69.8% of migrant households have a family member in a democratic country and 30.3% in a non-democratic country.9 To these central variables, I add a battery of individual- and household-level controls. They include a range of household attributes such as class and location in urban or rural areas. A four-level class variable, measuring the condition of residential dwelling, is a proxy for household income. It has four categories and was assessed by a ﬁeld interviewer according to clearly laid-out criteria prior to the ﬁeld interview. Personal characteristics of respondents consist of education, age, gender, and employment. Education has a eight-point scale ranging from no formal education to postgraduate degrees. Age and gender are standard controls and employment is a

8For a different specification, I also used the Gastil Index of Democracy. The raw scores of two categories in political rights and civil liberties are first combined and then rescaled so that they lie between 0 (full non-democracy) and 12 (full democracy).

9With raw Polity IV scores, the democracy mean score of the migrant household sample is 3.71 and the standard deviation is 8.94 (Polity IV score changes from -10 to 10), suggesting large variance.

81 binary indicator variable whether the respondent is currently employed. Table 4.1 displays basic descriptive statistics regarding all the variables used in the analysis.

Table 3.3: Summary Statistics Variable Mean Std. Dev. Min. Max. N Current migrant household 0.12 0.33 0 1 3598 Nonmigrant household 0.87 0.34 0 1 2398 Migrant household to autocracy 0.04 0.2 0 1 2398 Migrant household to democracy 0.09 0.29 0 1 2398 Household head former migrant 0.09 0.29 0 1 2400 voted in 2001 elections 0.8 0.4 0 1 2261 voted in 2004 elections 0.83 0.38 0 1 1123 Will surely vote in the 2007 election 0.76 0.43 0 1 1198 Will be involved in elections 0.69 0.46 0 1 1108 Followed the campaign news 3.49 1.18 1 5 1194 Age 41.55 15.08 18 94 3598 Female 0.5 0.5 0 1 3598 Education 4.45 1.71 1 8 3598 Class 1.85 0.67 1 4 3598 Employed 0.57 0.5 0 1 3598 Urban 0.54 0.5 0 1 3598 Want to Work Abroad 0.25 0.43 0 1 2400

Finally, it is clear that this study has the usual limitations associated with using cross-sectional and observational data. Panel data of migrant families before, during, and after randomized migration would be better equipped to examine causal effects. Such data is not available for this analysis. In addition, like many other works in the literature, this is also a single country study, which provides advantages in controlling for unobservable country-specific effects but limits its generalizability. The findings are, however, consistent with qualitative evidence I gathered on the

82 case and I am conﬁdent that the Philippines oﬀers a more balanced view of a typical sending country.

3.5 Empirical Analysis

I primarily use a binary probit specification for analyzing variance in turnout, electoral activity, and seeking election information. Because responses are nested within the provinces, I use robust standard errors, clustered at the provincial level in all specifications. Given the dichotomous nature of the dependent variables, I first present cross-tabulation results to introduce the relationship between migration and various measures of electoral participation before moving to multivariate regression analysis.

3.5.1 Financial Remittances

The financial remittances argument predicts that migration has a positive relationship with participation. As a first step, Table 3.4 displays the results of a cross- tabulation between migration and voter turnout in 2001 and 2004.10 If the financial remittances argument is true, respondents belonging to migrant households should more actively turn out to vote since they have more resources. The results, however, show no significant difference by migration. A chi-square test against the null hypothesis that all cells have equal frequencies by migration status yields a p-value of 0.523, indicating that the variation in turnout between the two groups is not significant.

10The results from the 2007 round are not included here for the presentation purpose.

83 Table 3.4: Turnout in 2001 and 2004 Elections, by Migration

Not voted Voted

363 1,654 2,017 Non-migrant Household (18.00%) ( 82.00%) (100%) 52 257 309 Migrant Household (16.83%) (83.17%) (100%)

Total 415 1,911 2,326 (17.84%) (82.16%) (100%) χ2(1)=0.4079. P=0.523 Sources: 2004 and 2007 SWS

Next I present a cross-tabulation between migration and involvement in electoral activity in Table 3.5. Again, there is no discernable difference in the percentage of respondents intending to participate in the campaigns or electoral administration between migrant household members (66.45%) and non-migrant household members (68.84%). Note that the percentage is even lower for respondents coming from a migrant household. A chi-square test against the null hypothesis that all cells have equal frequencies by migration status yields a p-value of 0.554, indicating that the variation is not significant. I then move to a cross-tabulation between migration and seeking campaign information in Table 3.6. Remember that the original survey item has a five-scale response category, but I created a dummy variable where 1 indicates “Very closely followed news” and 0 for otherwise. There is no discernable difference in the percentage of

84 Table 3.5: Involvement in Electoral Activity, by Migration

Not Volunteering Volunteering

297 656 960 Non-migrant Household (31.16 %) ( 68.84 %) (100 %) 52 103 155 Migrant Household (33.55 %) (66.45 %) (100 %)

Total 349 759 1,108 (31.50 %) (68.50 %) (100 %) χ2(1)=0.3511 P=0.554 Source: 2007 SWS

respondents who have followed campaign news between migrant household members (25.30%) and non-migrant household members (22.28%). Although the percentage is higher for respondents coming from a migrant household, a chi-square test against the null hypothesis that all cells have equal frequencies by migration status yields a p-value of 0.388, indicating that the variation is not signiﬁcant. Although the results of simple cross-tabulation are straightforward enough to make unnecessary any further analysis, additional statistical models with full controls were estimated to ensure the reliability of the results. Table 3.7 reports the estimation results. Models 1 through 3 estimate the eﬀect of participation on turnout in 2001, 2004, and 2007 elections. They show no relationship between having a family member working abroad and voting with the standard socioeconomic controls in

85 Table 3.6: Following Campaign News, by Migration

Not Following Following

799 229 1,028 Non-migrant Household (77.72 %) (22.28 %) (100 %) 124 42 166 Migrant Household (74.70 %) (25.30 %) (100 %)

Total 923 271 1,194 (77.30 %) (22.70 %) (100 %) χ2(1)= 0.7454 P=0.388 Source: 2007 SWS

place. The coefficients are not statistically significant in any of the survey rounds. Put differently, migration is not a significant predictor of voter turnout. Most control variables are in the hypothesized direction, but many are not statistically different from zero. Older respondents, female respondents, and employed respondents are more likely to vote in at least two election cycles. Respondents residing in urban areas are less likely to vote in all three election cycles. Other independent variables have an inconsistent effect: education, a powerful predictor of participation, has a significant effect only for the 2001 election. Class has no effect in any of the survey rounds. Next, I turn to volunteering. Model 4 indicates that having a family member abroad is negatively associated with willingness to participate in various campaign and election activities, which is at odds with the financial remittances hypothesis.

86 Table 3.7: Participation, by Migration

voted voted will vote Electoral Campaign 2001 2004 2007 Activity News Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5

Current Migrant Household -0.032 0.070 0.176 -0.008 0.108 (0.081) (0.185) (0.143) (0.131) (0.074) Age 0.028*** 0.014*** 0.010*** -0.006** 0.003* (0.004) (0.005) (0.003) (0.003) (0.002) Female 0.126 0.196** 0.281*** -0.200*** -0.044 (0.081) (0.082) (0.076) (0.060) (0.057) Education 0.070*** 0.042 0.077 -0.005 0.127*** (0.026) (0.029) (0.058) (0.027) (0.018) Class 0.008 0.120 0.126 -0.052 0.108 (0.061) (0.081) (0.082) (0.092) (0.069) Employed 0.388*** 0.241*** 0.278*** 0.054 0.040 (0.075) (0.072) (0.081) (0.100) (0.047) Urban -0.185** -0.159* -0.151* -0.223* -0.030 (0.081) (0.091) (0.089) (0.123) (0.072) Year 2003 -0.245*** (0.066) Constant -0.617*** -0.150 -0.499* 1.054*** (0.172) (0.193) (0.261) (0.188) N 2261 1123 1198 1108 1194 Wald χ2 222.13 50.61 117.51 52.76 96.70 p > χ2 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 Log pseudo-likelihood -1013.088 -493.283 -640.528 -679.310 -1760.729 Pseudo R2 0.092 0.034 0.037 0.016 0.016

Note: Models 1, 2, and 4 use reports of having voted in that election. Model 3 use the response “Will surely vote.” Robust standard errors in parentheses, with clustering by province. Model 5 presents results from ordered probit estimation. ?p < 0.10, ??p < 0.05, ???p < 0.01.

87 The standard errors are quite large, thererby indicating a high degree of variance in the relationship and suggesting the effect is statistically insignificant. This suggests that extra income fails to be translated into campaign participation and other forms of electoral work. This in turn poses a strong challenge to the financial remittances model because electoral activity is the domain where resources should serve a strong limiting factor. Unlike turnout, volunteering for campaign or election administration incurs substantial time and opportunity costs. Remittances should magnify the resource disparity to the extent that they are critical to participation. The absence of such an effect is convincing evidence against the migration-promotes-participation hypothesis. Finally, I analyze the relationship between financial remittances and seeking campaign information. Model 5 shows that belonging to a migrant household appears to be positively associated with more interest in campaign news, while controlling for the usual socioeconomic factors. Although the coefficient is in the hypothesized direction, it is not statistically different from zero. Additional time and money provided by financial remittances fails to be translated into greater interest in political information. Among the control variables, age and education are strong and significant predictors. Unlike the turnout results, employment and urban residency has no significant effects. Overall, the analysis generates a consistent set of findings, revealing that access to external funds through migration does not significantly increase electoral participation.

88 Table 3.8: Turnout in 2001 and 2004 Elections, by Migration Destination

Not voted Voted

15 79 94 Migrant Household to Autocracy (15.96%) ( 84.04%) (100%) 37 178 215 Migrant Household to Democracy (17.21%) (82.79%) (100%)

Total 52 257 309 (16.83%) (83.17%) (100%) χ2(1)=0.073 P= 0.787 Source: 2004 and 2007 SWS

3.5.2 Social Remittances

As discussed in the earlier section, to identify the eﬀects of ideas and attitudes transmitted by migration, we need to compare within migrant households and compare variance by diﬀerential levels of democracy. Recall that I use a dummy variable where 1 indicates the respondent belonging to a household with a family member currently residing in a democracy and 0 in a dictatorship. Migrant households with contacts to a dictatorship serves as a reference category. Since migrant households account for about 12% of the sample, comparing within migrant households reduces the sample size considerably. I begin by reviewing the claim that turnout increases as a result of exposure

89 to established democracy via migration. Table 3.8 displays the results of a cross- tabulation between migration destination and voter turnout. It shows turnout varies by migration groups (“Migrant household connected to autocracy,” and “Migrant household connected to democracy”). If the social remittances argument is true, respondents belonging to migrant households with ties to democracy should more actively participate in elections since they share the knowledge and ideals of democratic citizenship through their migrant family members residing in a democratic country. The results, however, show no significant difference in turnout by destination. A chi-square test against the null hypothesis that all cells have equal frequencies by migration destination yields a p-value of 0.787, indicating that the variation between these two groups is not significant. It is interesting to note that the percentage of those who voted in previous elections is even lower for households with a family member working in a democratic country (82.79 %) than for households with a family member working in an authoritarian country (84.04 %). This offers strong evidence against the social remittances hypothesis in which citizens with contacts to democracy adopt high levels of electoral participation. Now I move to a cross-tabulation between destination and involvement in electoral activity in Table 3.9. Again, there is no discernable difference in the percentage of respondents intending to volunteer in campaign or electoral administration between migrant household members (65.69%) and non-migrant household members (67.92 %). Note that the percentage is even lower for respondents coming from a migrant household. A chi-square test against the null hypothesis that all cells have equal

90 Table 3.9: Involvement in Electoral Activity, by Migration Destination

Not Volunteered Volunteered

17 36 53 Migrant Household to Autocracy (32.08 %) ( 67.92 %) (100 %) 35 67 102 Migrant Household to Democracy (34.31 %) (65.69 %) (100 %)

Total 52 103 155 (33.55 %) (66.45 %) (100 %) χ2(1)=0.078 P= 0.780 Source: 2007 SWS

frequencies by migration status yields a p-value of 0.780, indicating that the variation is not signiﬁcant. This indicates that contacts with democracy through migration do not increase participation in electoral activities. Finally, the results of a cross-tabulation between destination and seeking campaign information are presented in Table 3.10. The original survey item has a ﬁve- scale response category, and I created a dummy variable where 1 indicates “Very closely followed news” and 0 for otherwise. The percentage of respondents reporting they have closely followed campaign news is higher (29.63%) for a respondent with a family member in a democracy than otherwise (17.24%). A chi-square test against the null hypothesis that all cells have equal frequencies by migration status yields

91 Table 3.10: Following Campaign News, by Migration Destination

Not Following Following

48 10 58 Migrant Household to Autocracy (82.76 %) ( 17.24 %) (100 %) 76 32 108 Migrant Household to Democracy (70.37 %) (29.63 %) (100 %)

Total 124 42 166 (74.70 %) (25.30 %) (100 %) χ2(1)=3.064 P= 0.080 Source: 2007 SWS

a p-value of 0.08, indicating that the variation is statistically significant. This provides initial evidence that a positive relationship between contacts with democracy and seeking electoral information is worth pursing. Turning to full multivariate regression analysis, Table 3.11 reports the results of the estimation on three measures of electoral participation with the standard socioeconomic controls in place. Model 1 shows that the coefficient on the variable for migrant ties to a democracy is not statistically significant. The absence of any correlation raises a question about the effects of social remittances. Next, exploring the effect of social remittances on electoral activity in Model 2, I find no evidence that such an effect is present for migrant household members. In fact, contacts with democracy via migration register negative, albeit insignificant, effects. Exposure to well-established democratic institutions and civic activism

92 Table 3.11: Social Remittances and Participation

Dependent Variable Turnout Electoral Activity Campaign Information Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

Migrant Household to Democracy -0.122 -0.045 -.041 (0.167) (0.238) (0.118) Urban 0.115 -0.600* -0.263 (0.162) (0.316) (0.161) Class -0.084 -0.237 -0.041 (0.134) (0.262) (0.081) Education 0.027 0.109 0.225*** (0.081) (0.067) (0.050) Age 0.027*** -0.013* 0.008 (0.008) (0.007) (0.006) Female 0.323* -0.377** 0.271 (0.192) (0.166) (0.184) Employed 0.307 -0.244 -0.099 (0.192) (0.200) (0.119) Year 2003 -0.546** (0.216) Constant -0.145 1.678*** (0.449) (0.435) N 309 155 166 Wald χ2 41.17 18.78 45.52 p > χ2 0.000 0.009 0.000 Log pseudo-likelihood -121.412 -92.199 -227.877 Pseudo R2 0.139 0.068 0.038 Note: Models 1 and 2 report results of binary probit estimation while Model 3 uses ordered probit estimates. Constants from ordered probit estimations are not presented. Robust standard errors in parentheses, with clustering by province. ?p < 0.10, ??p < 0.05, ???p < 0.01. Source: 2004 and 2007 SWS

93 notwithstanding, contacts with a democratic host country has no impact on the involvement in campaign and electoral administration. Finally, the results reported in Model 3 also fail to find any evidence for migration- induced political learning. In contrast to the earlier results of cross-tabulation, the coefficient for migration to democracy is negative and statistically not significant with all the controls in place. It seems that education soaked up most of the effect attributable to migration-mediated contacts with to democracy. In sum, I fail to find evidence that migration transmits democratic attitudes that facilitate electoral participation. For all three dependent variables, the results indicate that there is no significant participation effect of migration.

3.6 Robustness Checks

The results are robust to different measures and model specifications. I estimated the relationship between having a migrant family member and showing an interest in campaign news using an ordered probit specification. In models not presented, I also estimated models with robust standard errors clustered by region and differently combined survey rounds. In other cases, I used Gastil Index as an alternative measure to Polity IV score to construct the destination variable. Table 3.12 presents the results of social remittance models using Gastil Index as a measure for the level of democracy of the host country. The regime type of the host country is consistently insignificant in affecting political participation. For all alternative models, the weight of evidence is consistent with earlier results. The absence of an effect does not appear to be a statistical or measurement artifact.

94 Table 3.12: Testing Social Remittances with Gastil Index instead of Polity

Turnout Electoral Activity Campaign Information Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Migrant Household to Democracy -0.093 0.141 0.327 (by Gastil Index) (0.205) (0.278) (0.235) Urban 0.182 -0.660** 0.085 (0.146) (0.333) (0.207) Class -0.187 -0.256 -0.142 (0.154) (0.297) (0.190) Education 0.052 0.071 0.202*** (0.092) (0.075) (0.077) Age 0.025*** -0.012 0.011* (0.008) (0.008) (0.007) Female 0.285 -0.439** 0.098 (0.211) (0.179) (0.311) Employed 0.289* -0.281 -0.212 (0.172) (0.194) (0.181) Year 2003 -0.556** (0.269) Constant 0.063 1.833*** -2.183*** (0.493) (0.513) (0.627) N 286 147 158 Wald χ2 36.74 16.89 12.60 p > χ2 0.000 0.018 0.0826 Log pseudo-likelihood -109.443 -86.748 -81.144 Pseudo R2 0.109 0.073 0.069 Note: All present the results of binary probit estimation. Destination countries are coded dictatorship if the rescaled freedom house score is 0 to 3 and democracy otherwise. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, with clustering by province. ?p < 0.10, ??p < 0.05, ???p < 0.01.

95 Since the results indicate no correlation, it is not necessary to apply a sophisti- cated identification strategy. Still, it is worth discussing what would be a strategy should the results indicate a significant relationship between migration and electoral participation. My empirical strategy should be essentially an effort to answer vari- ants of the following questions: “Would the respondent have voted if her mother had been working abroad?” or “Would the respondent have voted if her mother was working in a democracy and not in an autocracy?” Regression allows us to compare someone with characteristics comparable to the respondent except that none of the person’s family members are abroad (or abroad but not in a democracy, depending on the question). Yet it is likely that unobservable characteristics affect both the migration propensity of a household and the respondent’s political behavior. In the absence of experiments or effective instrumental variables, addressing this identification problem directly is difficult. At least for the turnout question, my data permits a weaker, but still useful, strategy to deal with the issue. The 2001 and 2004 SWS ask whether the household head was a former migration worker. Using this along with the information about the current migrant, I am able to compare the effect of current migration with that of past migration while controlling for the household fixed effects. The assumption here is that the effect of financial and social remittances fades over time while household characteristics associated with migration propensity and political attitudes stay the same. This leads to the analysis with a restricted sample where non-migrant households are replaced with households that have no current migrants but had migrants

96 Table 3.13: Turnout: Comparing Former and Current Migrant Households

DV=Voted in 2001 Model 1 Model 2 Current Migrant Household -0.010 (0.225) Migrant Household to Democracy 0.094 (0.201) Age 0.045*** 0.045*** (0.008) (0.009) Female 0.183 0.169 (0.144) (0.153) Education 0.036 0.036 (0.095) (0.093) Class -0.186 -0.198 (0.162) (0.152) Employed 0.115 0.134 (0.139) (0.142) Urban -0.126 -0.127 (0.227) (0.241) Constant -0.981 -1.001* (0.576) (0.547) N 220 220 Wald χ2 43.92 100.39 p > χ2 0.000 0.000 Log pseudo-likelihood -102.840 -102.744 Pseudo R2 0.176 0.177 Note: The sample only includes households with past or current overseas migrant workers with no overlap. Models 1 and 2 present the results of binary probit estimation. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, with clustering by province. ?p < 0.10, ??p < 0.05, ???p < 0.01. Sources 2003 and 2007 SWS

97 in the past. By forcing a comparison between households of current and former migrant households, I address the selection issue to some extent. Table 3.13 presents the results from the restricted sample. Neither having a family member working abroad nor having him or her in a democratic host country aﬀects the likelihood of voting in an election.11

3.7 Conclusion

Does exit promote voice? The extant literature argues that exit fosters the voice of citizens left behind through financial remittances and socially transmitted democratic values. In the previous chapter, I argued that a better understanding of political outcomes of migration should consider how resources and incentives unleashed by remittance inflows and cross-border labor mobility shape citizen behavior at the individual level. I also pointed out that much of the existing literature gives a prominent role to resources in predicting the outcome of feedback between exit and voice. I then claimed that incentives are far more critical than resources to political engagement in a migration setting. In this chapter, I tested empirical implications of the resource-centered argument for electoral participation. Specifically, I examined whether financial and social remittances create a participation gap in the sending country by introducing external funds and a new type of socialization. In contrast to the popular view, I find no evidence consistent with the hypothesis that members of migrant households behave

11It is only applicable to the turnout models since electoral activity and campaign news are only present in the 2007 round where no information about the past migration exists.

98 any differently from members of non-migrant households in electoral participation. I likewise failed to find support for the argument that households with contacts with democracy are more actively involved in the electoral process than those with dictatorship. In short, remittance income and transnational migration networks do not appear to affect the level of political participation. What do these findings imply for the overall argument of this dissertation? Re- call that my core claim is that exit affects voice but does so in a particular way. I argue that migration undermines the extent to which citizens enforce democratic accountability by making them less inclined to reward well-performing officials or punish poorly-performing ones. Much of previous research considers migration and remittances to increase the political power of ordinary citizens without specifying the type of voice to be affected. As a first empirical step to test my political disengagement argument, the results of this chapter show that exit does not affect the level of electoral participation, most notably turnout. In other words, remittances and migration do not affect how frequently citizen participate in the electoral process. The absence of migration’s participant effect then allows us to conclude that migration’s political impact, if existing, is likely to affect vote choice. Based on the findings of this chapter, I turn to vote choice to examine the effects of migration on voice. Political impact of external resources and the exit option is better observed when citizens need to critically evaluate and engage with the government. In the next chapter, I offer evidence that citizens on migrant networks appear to have different considerations in their relationship with the government. Combined with the results of this chapter, the findings of the next chapter will suggest that

99 migration may change what citizens consider when they participate, but not how they frequently participate.

100 3.8 Appendix

First Quarter 2007 Social Weather Survey

Q. R31. Which among the following activities do you plan to undertake in the coming May 2007 elections?

1. None

2. Put up posters for politicians

3. Attend political rallies of political candidates to listen to their platforms]

4. Actively campaign for a political candidate

5. Be a member of Board of Election Inspectors (BEI)

6. Serve for organizations that will help in having an orderly and clean elections

7. Be a watcher for a political candidate

8. Watch the counting of votes even if I am not a member of any organizations

Here are some events reported in the media in the past 3 months. For each one, please say if you followed the reports Very closely, Somewhat closely, Just a little, Not at all, Have you just heard about this now?

Q. 11. The preparations of politicians for the coming elections

1. Very closely

101 2. Somewhat closely

3. Just a little

4. Not at all

5. Have you just heard about this now

6...

7. No answer

8. Don’t know

9. Refused

102 CHAPTER 4

THE EFFECT OF MIGRATION ON THE UTILITY OF

CITIZENSHIP: SURVEY EVIDENCE

4.1 Introduction

Do external resources and opportunities undermine the beneﬁts and the importance of citizenship? The notion of membership to a polity not only includes the noble ideal of self-government but also the practical considerations of access to public goods and government services exclusively available to the members. In the development of a theory of migration-induced political disengagement in Chapter Two, I argued that, in contrast to the currently popular accounts, international migration undermines citizens’ involvement in the political process by reducing the incentives to hold the government accountable for fulﬁlling its responsibilities. I began by claiming that citizens who gain access to external resources and opportunities through migration, most commonly as family members of migrants, should be less interested in ensuring representation and likewise less likely to sanction politicians for their performance at the ballot box. I predicted that consequently, the extent to which voters link their

103 electoral support to the incumbent’s performance should be negatively affected by the level of migration among the electorate. Central to this overall argument is a micrologic that remittances and migration prospects indeed diminish the potential and actual benefits of government functions and services, as defined and discussed extensively in Chapter Two. As households gain new financial resources in the form of remittances, they find private solutions for services that have traditionally been provided by the government. At the same time, their access to remittances also enables them to advance economically in their home society and protect them from the vagaries of the national economy. A nascent literature offers empirical evidence regarding the impact of remittances on the reliance on government services. Given the general economic underdevelopment and attending underprovision of public services in the sending country, studies draw attention to the substitution effect in the public sector. A recent example focuses on the impact on utilities (Adida & Girod 2011), where the authors show that households receiving remittances tend to have privately financed solutions for water and sanitation needs. Existing studies, however, are limited in their scope: they pay inordinate attention to utilities, which is only part of the vast range of services the modern government provides, without examining broader implications of access to external resources. The utility of citizenship, the key mediating variable of my study, includes benefits far more than access to publicly provided services; there are broader benefits associated with being a member of a polity, including the national economic conditions, which is an important factor that determines the general well-being of individual citizens.

104 In this chapter, I offer empirical evidence for the micrologic of my argument by using individual-level survey data from the Philippines. In doing so, I improve upon the existing studies by using two new measures of the utility of citizenship. My approach is to distinguish two types of citizenship benefits. The first measure captures a more direct payoff from the social contract of democracy, that is, social and economic services the government provides to assist citizens in securing food, funds, jobs, and training. The second considers a broader relationship between citizens and government performance, that is, national economic conditions. Specifically, I focus on how citizens evaluate their personal financial situation relative to the national economy over time. The idea is that citizens receiving remittances should feel they are getting ahead of the rest of the society, and this serves as a useful measure of migration-driven insulation. To preview the findings, migrant households are less reliant on government assistance for economic services. This is consistent with previous research that migrant households turn to private solutions in areas that fall traditionally under government responsibility. Evidence from the survey also suggests that migrant households do not share evaluations of their personal finance and the national economic conditions with non-migrant households. Specifically, they appear to feel that they have been and will be getting economically ahead of the rest of the society. The findings support my claim that government performance is less relevant to citizens under high-migration conditions: citizens with access to remittances and migration opportunities demand fewer public services and feel less vulnerable to how the government handles the economy. This supports a claim that if citizens

105 appear less interested in performing their duties to force the government to get its act together, it is because citizens see fewer returns to their involvement in politics. This chapter has ﬁve sections. The next section reviews the existing theoretical and empirical literature on migration and its impact on the utility of citizenship. The following section then presents my argument and testable hypotheses about migration’s impact on the level of insulation felt by migrant households with respect to the fortune of the rest of the society. I then describe the empirical strategy to test the argument and present the main results. Finally, I conclude by discussing the implications of my ﬁndings.

4.2 External Resources and the Utility of Citizenship

With 215.8 million migrants around the world and remittance ﬂows reaching $440 billion in 2010 (World Bank 2010), international migration is reshaping the political economy terrain of many developing countries. As discussed in Chapter Two, what makes contemporary international migration stand out among political economy forces is its purportedly (1) transnational and (2) private nature. It is transnational because migrants of today tend to straddle the border and maintain emotional and economic ties with their families even after they move abroad. The resulting remittance ﬂows directly infuse external resources into the origin country. Fam- ily members of migrants, heavily dependent upon the remittance income, become incorporated into the global economy. International migration and its consequences are private because the movement of people and remittances are private exchanges compared to other globalization

106 processes. To be sure, some governments intervene in the migration process more than others. The Philippines, the research country of this study, is well known for the heavy involvement of the government in regulating labor migration of its citizens. Burma/Myanmar imposes a 10% tax on the income earned by its citizens working abroad (Yin 2007). Nonetheless, it is still the case that remittances are private- to-private transfers and, barring the extreme cases, citizens gain access to external opportunities without heavily relying on government channels. The most crucial implication of this transnational, private nature of migration and remittances is that it accords certain level of autonomy from the state. As discussed in Chapter Two, many migration scholars emphasize the fact that migration “bypasses” the government and creates a relatively autonomous space for citizens. The question then is how these newly gained external resources alter the relationship between citizens and the government. My argument throughout this dissertation is that migration, on balance, diminishes the importance of the citizen-government interdependence in an instrumental sense. Recall that, in principle, citizens in a democracy maintain a social contract with their government whereby citizens contribute taxes, services, and loyalty while the government offers provisions and protection. In this particularly instrumental vision of democracy, the extent to which citizens work to enforce this contract is naturally determined by the potential and actual benefits they gain from such a relationship. As such, when citizens find ways to obtain services outside the government with newly found resources and opportunities, it is expected that they will have fewer incentives to ensure the government performs well.

107 The existing theoretical and empirical treatment of the role of migration in affecting the utility of citizenship is uneven. Goodman and Hiskey (2008) offer an “exit without leaving” argument that remittance transfers and durable transnational ties diminish the importance of the political community for those left behind. They further predict that consequently, citizens receiving remittances and residing in a high-migration community will withdraw from institutionalized politics and invest more in civic networks that will enable their own departure in the future. Using individual and aggregate-level data from the 2000 presidential election in Mexico, they show that municipalities with higher levels of migration register lower levels of voter turnout and that individuals residing in high-migration municipalities also were less likely to have voted in that election. The authors argue that migration contributes to “lessening the role of the formal political system” and drives citizens away from political engagement. They conclude that “the net effects of migration, at least in the short term, are deleterious to the political life of sending communities” (p.184).1 Nevertheless, despite such insights, they do not elaborate on how to measure such membership. Nor does their work offer empirical evidence for the underlying mechanism regarding whether migration offers alternative options to the existing political and economic arrangements. More general theoretical insights about the negative impact of migration on citizenship have been offered (Abdih &

1Other scholars maintain the focus on the resource dimension, but argue that its political eﬀects are endogenous to the pre-existing political structure. They emphasize that transnational political engagement is highly selective and contingent on the host country context, and carries a risk of reproducing pre-migration power relations. They are especially critical of the argument that migration can be an agent of change in the developing world (Waldinger & Fitzgerald 2004, Waldinger 2008).

108 Montiel. 2008, Hirschman 1970), but the literature lacks empirical confirmation of the micrologic. On the other hand, empirical studies that examine the household behaviors in a migration context fail to link their findings to broader theoretical implications. Adida and Girod (2011) offer empirical evidence that migrant households turn to private solutions for the provision of basic utilities. Using municipal-level data from Mexico between 1995 and 2000, they show that migrant households increased access to clean water and sewage through household-driven, private methods. Their work is part of the emerging literature that looks at the development effect of remittances. What is less obvious in these studies is how remittance use and related household economic behavior changes citizens’ political attitudes toward the government. A more useful approach to the migration-political process is therefore to construct empirical tests that better capture how migration affects the utility of the government for citizens in a theoretically focused way. In what follows, I adopt two measures that better reflect the linkage between migration and the government provisions, which includes both direct services and broader performance.

4.3 Measuring the Utility of Citizenship: Government Ser- vices and Private Solutions

The key empirical task of this chapter is to measure the utility of citizenship in a reliable and quantiﬁable way in a context of migration. The most important consideration is to show that external resources and opportunities indeed diminish the importance of formal political systems, notably the utility of the government to

109 individual citizens. To do that, I examine whether migration creates insulation from consequences of government activities in two areas: one narrow and the other broad. The ﬁrst area is government assistance to citizens. Public services are direct channels through which citizens relate to the government. Thus, the extent to which citizens turn to the government for services indicates the level of the state’s importance to the general well-being of those citizens. The political importance of public services is more pronounced in developing countries because public services are tightly linked to the legitimacy of political institutions in these places. Especially in developing countries, where most international migrants originate and send back remittances, citizens have high expectations of government services. Although public goods provision may be limited in these societies due to resource constraints, citizens still expect the state to provide quite a wide range of public goods (Chhibber et al. 2004). Data from the World Values Survey show that citizens living in low-income countries demand a more extensive role of the government in promoting citizens’ well-being. Figure 4.1 shows the raw correlation between expectations of government responsibilities and levels of economic development.2 Consequently, when these needs are unmet while citizens discover alternative source of solutions—for instance, migration and remittances—high expectations may lead to high levels of disengagement with the government. XXXX The political economy environment where remittances aﬀect government services

2I use the national average of the responses to the question “People should take more responsibility to provide for themselves vs. The government should take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for” on a scale of 1 to 10.

110 Figure 4.1: Perceptions of Government Responsibilities and Development Levels by Country

in many sending countries consists of two factors. First, public goods and publicly provided private goods such as security, education, health care, and physical infrastructure are generally underprovided in these countries. Second, economic inequality tends to be high in these societies, making diﬃcult citizens’ collective action for society-wide improvement for more public goods (Boix 2003). Under these conditions, the inﬂow of private funds into individual households naturally leads to private solutions for what the government would provide otherwise, not political mobilization for better government programs. With the availability of private providers, migrant

111 households are likely to satisfy their needs in education, health care, utilities, and safety in the private sector. There is abundant anecdotal evidence across sending countries that migrant households opt for private schools, private health clinics, four-wheel-drive vehicles for unpaved roads, and gated communities with private security (Onishi 2010).3 As mentioned earlier, Adida and Girod (2011) oﬀer systematic evidence that migrant households turn to “non-state provision” of clean water and sewage access.4 There- fore, the extent to which citizens turn to government services or private solutions is a useful indicator of the relevance of the government and, by extension, the utility of citizenship. In this study, I use citizens’ reliance on economic assistance as a measure for direct government services. To repeat, the information about the extent to which citizens turn to the government for food, ﬁnancial assistance, jobs, or training captures an important aspect of the social contract of democracy.

H1: For economic assistance, migrant households use more private solutions and rely less on the government.

The second measure considers a broader area of government performance, namely,

3I do not consider here whether the government or the private sector is better able to provide the services.

4Migration seems to raise expectations of government services . In anecdotal evidence, migrants are reported to have higher expectations of the government. “They reﬂect migrants’ heightened concern with safety and health and their assumption that living in a developed community means living somewhere where these services are part and parcel of what good governments do. ... Not only do they expect the government to share the cost of public safety but to partner with them in providing education and health. They also scale up as community members not only change their expectations of local government but of provincial and national government as well.” (Lamba-Nieves & Levitt 2011, p.28)

112 the economic conditions of the country. Citizens not only respond to direct benefits of government services but consider the state of the economy within which they lead a life. The theoretical insight of this approach is drawn from the economic voting literature, which tells us that one of the most important issues voters consider when they evaluate the incumbent government is the economy (Duch & Stevenson 2008, Erikson 1989, Key 1966, Kiewiet 1983). In their approach to the relationship between economic conditions and election results, political scientists have long used a conceptual distinction between voters’ evaluations of their personal financial circumstances—“pocketbook judgments”—and their assessment of national economic conditions—“sociotropic judgments.” Pocketbook voting is based on a hypothesis that voters come to judge the government’s economic performance through personal economic experiences, or change in personal financial situations while sociotropic voting privileges aggregate (as a country) performance (Kinder & Kiewiet 1981). This literature has developed to make sense of the impact of these considerations on voter turnout (Arceneaux 2003, Fiorina 1978) and vote choice (Duch & Stevenson 2008, Erikson 1990). Building on this literature, I use how closely citizens link their personal fortunes to the national economy as an indicator of their economic insulation from the rest of the society. Because modern governments are held accountable for macroeconomic conditions, if households perceive that their economic well-being remains largely unaffected by national economic conditions, their incentives to sanction the government accordingly should decrease as a result. For my analysis, I use pocketbook and sociotropic evaluations as dependent variables, departing from the common practice in

113 the economic voting literature. Specifically, I use a combination of pocketbook and sociotropic evaluations to take advantage of how respondents evaluate their own well- being relative to the state of the national economy (Killian, Schoen, & Dusso 2008). If migration insulates citizens from domestic economic conditions by enabling them to access external resources and opportunities, this should lead to a systematic gap between the assessments of personal financial situations and the national economy. A good way to capture this gap and turn it into a testable hypothesis is to use the concept of relative comparison. On the personal level, it is likely that migrant households perceive that their households enjoy improvement in financial terms more than non-migrants. Since remittance wealth is significant and its flows are stable—remittance flows tend to be counter-cyclical and largely stable over time (Yang & Choi 2007)—migrant households should experience financial improvement relative to non-migrant households of similar characteristics. On the other hand, migrant household members have no theoretical reason to evaluate the national economic conditions differently from non- migrant households. Put differently, the migration status of households should not be systematically correlated with assessments of economic conditions. These considerations combine to produce a hypothesis that migrant households should feel they are getting ahead of the rest of the society. The logic is straightforward: if your household is consistently getting wealthier when others are not, the net result is that you are getting ahead. Technical details about how I construct this variable will be discussed in the following section. I use this concept for the simplicity of analysis.

114 H2: Migrant household members should feel they are getting ahead economically of the rest of the society.

In short, these two measures capture the extent to which migration insulates citizens from the consequences of government activities. One attempts to measure more direct beneﬁts of government services while the other addresses broader inﬂuences of government performance in the national economy. The common idea underlying both hypotheses is that migration opportunities and remittance resources should pull households away from politics.

4.4 The Data

To test these hypotheses, I use survey data from the Philippines. My dataset consists of three rounds of cross-sectional survey from the 2002, 2003, and 2007 Social Weather Survey (SWS), which is a quarterly survey designed and administered by the Social Weather Stations based in Manila. The nationally-representative dataset contains responses from voting-age Filipinos and has questions about the migrant status of household members. It should be noted that the analysis in this chapter is particularly focused on the household as a unit of analysis. Migration, especially for its economic motivation, is essentially a household-level development strategy. It is a “voluntary contractual arrangement” (Stark & Lucas 1988, p.466) between the migrant and the family to

115 secure financial resources to achieve insurance, income smoothing, and investment (Rosenzweig 1988, Yang & Choi 2007).5 I use two sets of dependent variables to measure migrant households’ distance from domestic conditions. First, as discussed above, I study whether migrant households are likely to turn to government assistance or private solutions for securing emergency funds, food, jobs, or training. The SWS in 2002 and 2003 asked respondents about the help their households received in the preceding three months. First, respondents were asked whether their family received help in any of the following: money, loans, food, non-food items, jobs, support for school or training, or any other kind of service. Respondents were then asked to indicate the source of assistance among the following: (1) relatives, (2) friends, (3) private persons who are not relatives or friends, (4) the government, (5) businesses, and (6) NGOs. In my analysis, I create a variable with three unordered response categories coded 0 when no assistance has been received in the past three months, 1 when the government is cited as the source of assistance, and 2 when the private sector (anything other then the government) is cited as the source. I do not differentiate between different types of assistance; thus, assistance in securing a position in a training program is identical to securing cash in my coding. Likewise, I do not consider the possibility that multiple sources are likely to be present for a single household or weigh the level of assistance according to the type of assistance.

5Earlier works on the determinants of remittances were developed with respect to internal (rural- to-urban) migration in developing countries (Rosenzweig 1988, Stark & Lucas 1988, Carrington, Detragiache & Vishwanath 1996). Yet the logic readily applies to international migration in its economic rationale.

116 Second, I examine the level of insulation among migrant households by how they are evaluating the over-time trends of their individual household finances and the national economy. If evaluations of individual (pocketbook) and national economic (sociotropic) trends diverge significantly along the migration line, this should indicate that migration makes households members insulated from the circumstances of the rest of the society. The SWS contains a series of questions about prospective, retrospective, pocketbook, and sociotropic evaluations. The combination creates four questions although “retrospective, sociotropic” evaluations are only available from the 2007 survey. I create a new measure to capture the insulation effect by pairing prospective pocketbook and prospective sociotropic evaluations as in Killian, Schoen and Dusso (2008). The new measure combines pocketbook and sociotropic prospective assessment to create (1) falling behind, (2) keeping up, and (3) getting ahead categories in order to show that migrant households think they have been and will be better off than others. Since I hypothesize that migrant households evaluate their life trends more positively than non-migrant households, while there is no significant difference about the evaluation of national economy between migration and non-migrant households, migration households should find their economic situations have improved and will improve compared to the rest of the society. The independent variable of interest is a binary indicator variable whether respondents belong to a household that has a family member currently working abroad.

117 Including detailed information about remittances and other migration characteristics would surely increase the inferential quality of this study. However, due to data limitations, it is beyond the scope of this study and is not attempted here.6 To these central variables, I add a battery of household- and individual-level controls. Household characteristics include economic class and location in urban or rural areas. A four-level class variable, measuring the condition of residential dwelling, is a proxy for household income. It has four categories and is assessed by a field interviewer according to clearly laid-out criteria. It should be noted that the receipt of assistance is a household-level event, im- plying that controlling the household attributes might be sufficient to make a valid inference about a relationship between migration and the source of economic assistance. However, personal characteristics of respondents may influence the report of the relevant information. For sensitivity checks, I estimate models with and without the personal-level variables of the survey respondent. Personal characteristics consist of education, age, gender, and employment. Education has a eight-point scale ranging from no formal education to postgraduate degrees. Age and gender are standard controls and employment is a binary indicator variable whether the respondent is currently employed. Table 4.1 displays basic descriptive statistics regarding all the variables used in the analysis. In total, 35% of households have received any type of economic assistance in the previous three months. 7% cited the government as the source of

6As discussed in Chapter Three, I use information only about whether a respondent has a current migrant family member and exclude whether the respondent or a family member is a return migrant.

118 Table 4.1: Summary Statistics Variable Mean Std. Dev. Min. Max. N Received government assistance 0.07 0.25 0 1 2398 Received assistance from the private sector 0.28 0.45 0 1 2398 Have been getting ahead 0.27 0.44 0 1 1195 Will be getting ahead 0.34 0.47 0 1 3592 Pocketbook, retrospective evaluations 1.73 0.75 1 3 3595 Sociotropic, retrospective evaluations 1.82 0.69 1 3 1196 Pocketbook, prospective evaluations 2.1 0.68 1 3 3595 Sociotropic, prospective evaluations 1.84 0.71 1 3 3594 Current Migrant Household 0.12 0.33 0 1 3598 Nonmigrant Household 0.87 0.34 0 1 2398 Age 41.55 15.08 18 94 3598 Female 0.5 0.5 0 1 3598 Education 4.45 1.71 1 8 3598 Class 1.85 0.67 1 4 3598 Employed 0.57 0.5 0 1 3598 Urban 0.54 0.5 0 1 3598

assistance while 28% cited private sources, including families and friends. For all the economic “evaluations” variables, the median response is either “same as last year” or “same as this year” respectively. The original survey instruments for dependent variables are presented in the data appendix.

4.5 Empirical Analysis

I primarily use a binary probit specification for analyzing variance for the following analysis. Given the dichotomous nature of the dependent variables, I first present crosstabulation results to introduce the relationship between migration and various measures of the benefits of citizenship before moving to multivariate regression

119 analysis. Considering the diﬃculties associated with interpreting probit estimation results, I then present predicted probabilities for a typical respondent.

4.5.1 Government Assistance and Private Solutions

I ﬁrst test the hypothesis that migrant households are less reliant on government assistance and more likely to seek private solutions. I begin by presenting a crosstabulation of migration and the reliance on government assistance in times of need in Table 4.2. About 4.7% of the respondents from non-migrant households reported that they received any form of assistance in cash, food, jobs, or training in the last three month from the government and 17.4% reported they secured the same assistance from private sources. On the other hand, the share is 3.4% for government assistance and as high as 27.6% among migrant households. A chi-square test against the null hypothesis that all cells have equal frequencies by migration status yields a p-value of 0.000, indicating the variation is signiﬁcant.7 For a full statistical test, I estimate a multinomial probit model of economic assistance in jobs, training, or emergency provision of food or funds. The key prediction is that migrant households are less likely to seek assistance from the government and more likely to turn to private solutions. Table 4.3 presents the results. Since the receipt of economic assistance takes place at the household level, Model 1 ex- cludes individual characteristics to see whether the respondent’s individual traits

7The relatively small cell count in migrant households that received government assistance (N=15) could raise a question about the appropriateness of using a chi-square test. The expected frequency of the cell, however, is (442×161)/3598=20, which is suﬃciently greater than 5 required for the test.

120 Table 4.2: Economic Assistance, by Migration

Source of Assistance No Assistance Government Private

2,460 146 550 3,156 Non-migrant Household ( 77.95 %) ( 4.63 %) ( 17.43 %) (100 %) 305 15 122 442 Migrant Household ( 69.00 %) (3.39 %) ( 27.60 %) (100 %)

Total 2,765 161 672 3,598 ( 76.85 %) ( 4.47 %) ( 18.68 %) (100%) χ2(2)=26.84 P=0.000 Source: 2003 and 2007 Social Weather Survey, the Philippines

change the results. Model 2 then includes the respondent’s characteristics along with household-level information. The results from both models clearly show that migrant households are more likely to seek private solutions when they need economic assistance. This is consistent with theoretical expectations. In contrast, migration is not significantly associated with the likelihood of securing government services. One possible explanation may be that the reliance on government services was modest to begin with and households channel newly acquired remittance income directly to private alternatives. Considering the non-linear nature of the coefficients from a multinomial logistical regression, the substantive magnitude and significance of these relationships are better understood with predicted probabilities (King, Tomz & Wittenberg 2000). Figure

121 Table 4.3: Sources of Economic Assistance, by Migration

Model 1 Model 2 DV = Source Government Private Government Private

Migrant Household -0.128 0.480** -0.112 0.471** (0.193) (0.210) (0.196) (0.207) Urban -0.142 0.544*** -0.172 0.451*** (0.421) (0.115) (0.420) (0.109) Class -0.313 0.005 -0.328 -0.053 (0.230) (0.109) (0.248) (0.106) Education 0.030 0.085** (0.063) (0.036) Age -0.002 -0.001 (0.004) (0.003) Female (0.004) 0.235** (0.135) (0.092) Employed 0.115 -0.039 0.115 (0.066) Year 2007 0.709 0.634*** 0.711 0.640*** (0.465) (0.141) (0.462) (0.138) Constant -2.026** -1.571*** -2.214*** -1.850*** (0.879) (0.295) (0.807) (0.336) N 2398 2398 Log pseudo-likelihood -1896.7886 -1888.9039 Pseudo R2 0.0311 0.0351 Note: Coeﬃcients are from multinomial logistic regression models. The baseline category is no assistance. Robust standard errors in parentheses, with clustering by region. ?p < 0.10, ??p < 0.05, ???p < 0.01.

122 4.2 provides a graphical representation of the predicted probabilities of choosing different sources of economic assistance for a representative respondent.8 It shows that migrant households are more likely to adopt private solutions and to rely less on government services. The magnitudes of the changes are much larger for private solutions.

Figure 4.2: Economic Assistance, by Migration Note: Predicted probabilities with 95% conﬁdence intervals.

Most control variables are statistically insigniﬁcant with the exception of the

8A representative respondent is deﬁned as a 42-year-old female, who is employed, residing in an urban area and coming from the upper middle class.

123 urban variable. In all models, urban residents are less likely to receive assistance from the government. It is curious why class or education (assuming that the respondent’s education level is correlated with the household head’s education level) has no effect at all on the reliance on government assistance. In sum, the results confirm Hypothesis 1, that migrant households are less likely to turn to the government for public services they need. This offers evidence that external resources and opportunities could overshadow the importance of government services for citizens.

4.5.2 Economic Assessments

Now I turn to the second hypothesis to test migration’s insulation effect in relation to the rest of the society. Identifying the effect of migration on “getting ahead,” whereby the sense of economic advancement is manifest regardless of the performance of national economy, is key to this empirical strategy. Before proceeding to multivariate statistical analysis, I present a crosstabulation of migration and economic evaluations in Table 4.4 and Table 4.5. For retrospective evaluations where the respondent assessed the economic conditions compared to a year ago, 32% of the respondents from migrant households indicated that their households has been getting ahead of the rest of the society, whereas the share is 27% among non-migrant households. A chi-square test against the null hypothesis that all cells have equal frequencies by migration status yields a p-value of 0.05, indicating the variation is significant. For prospective evaluations for how their household financial situations will fare in the coming year compared to the rest of the society, 36% of migrant households indicated that they will get ahead, whereas the share is 33% 124 Table 4.4: Retrospective Assessments, by Migration

Compared to the Rest of Society

Falling Behind Keeping Up Getting Ahead Total

Non-migrant Household 270 488 272 1,030 ( 26.21 %) ( 47.38 %) (26.41 %) 100.00 Migrant Household 29 84 52 165 (17.58 %) (50.91 %) (31.52 %) 100.00

Total 299 572 324 1,195 ( 25.02 %) ( 47.87 %) (27.11 %) 100.00 χ2(1)=5.98 P=0.05 Source: 2007 Social Weather Survey, the Philippines

among non-migrant households. A chi-square test against the null hypothesis that all cells have equal frequencies by migration status yields a p-value of 0.02, indicating the variation is significant. All together, the results suggest that there is a correlation between the migration status of the household and how its members feel about their economic security—hence insulation from the national economic conditions. Table 4.6 presents results from the full statistical tests. Models 1 though 3 examine retrospective evaluations as to how the households have fared compared to a year ago. Model 1 is the primary model of interest for retrospective evaluations with Getting Ahead as the dependent variable. The positive and significant coefficients show that belonging to a migrant household is associated with Getting Ahead, economically,

125 Table 4.5: Prospective Assessments, by Migration

Compared to the Rest of Society

Falling Behind Keeping Up Getting Ahead Total

Non-migrant Household 430 1,681 1,040 3,151 ( 13.65 %) (53.35 %) ( 33.01 %) 100.00 Migrant Household 41 235 165 441 ( 9.30 %) ( 53.29 %) ( 37.41 %) 100.00

Total 471 1,916 1,205 3,592 (13.11 %) (53.34 %) (33.55 %) 100.00 χ2(1)=7.82 P=0.02 Source: 2002, 2003, and 2007 Social Weather Survey, the Philippines

of the rest of the population. Since the pocketbook and sociotropic variables have three response categories, I use ordered probit regressions for estimation for Models 2 and 3. Model 2 uses pocketbook evaluation as the dependent variable. Although the direction of the coefficient is positive, it is statistically insignificant. Model 3 uses sociotropic evaluation as the dependent variable. The negative and significant coefficient indicates that respondents from migrant households assess the national economic conditions more negatively.9 Turning to prospective evaluations, Models 4 though 6 examine the effect of migration on how the respondents assess the household will fare in the coming year.

9It is beyond the scope of this study to explain why this may be the case, but it is possible that migration raises the expectations of the national economy.

126 As in the first panel, Model 4 employs “getting ahead” as the dependent variable. Confirming Hypothesis 2, the coefficient of the migration variable is positive and significant. Model 5 also shows that migration is positively and significantly associated with positive outlook for household financial situations. In contrast, Model 6 shows that migration has no significant effect on whether the respondent thinks that the national economy will improve in the future.

127 Table 4.6: Economic Insulation

Retrospective Evaluations Prospective Evaluations Getting Ahead Pocketbook Sociotropic Getting Ahead Pocketbook Sociotropic Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Migrant Household 0.188* 0.157 -0.122* 0.104** 0.154*** -0.009 (0.099) (0.115) (0.065) (0.050) (0.053) (0.062) Age -0.006*** -0.011*** -0.005*** -0.004** -0.010*** -0.006*** (0.001) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) Female 0.063* 0.024 -0.035 0.037 0.039 -0.034 (0.032) (0.063) (0.093) (0.073) (0.063) (0.060) Education 0.062*** 0.012 -0.027 0.040*** 0.038*** -0.016*** (0.014) (0.016) (0.017) (0.007) (0.008) (0.006) Class -0.102 0.062 0.082*** -0.006 0.067 0.061 (0.113) (0.064) (0.028) (0.040) (0.065) (0.047) 128 Employed 0.148 0.086 -0.001 0.035 -0.007 -0.068** (0.091) (0.061) (0.056) (0.056) (0.059) (0.028) Urban 0.008 0.074** 0.076 0.061 0.103 0.054 (0.027) (0.031) (0.141) (0.055) (0.076) (0.048) Year 2003 0.102** 0.035 -0.014 (0.041) (0.058) (0.021) Year 2007 -0.105*** 0.234*** 0.343*** (0.037) (0.071) (0.123) Constant -0.637*** -0.497*** (0.116) (0.076) N 1195 1197 1196 3592 3595 3594 Wald χ2 18.73 2.08 24.08 46.54 14.06 15.31 p > χ2 0.0091 0.557 0.000 0.000 0.003 0.002 Log pseudo-likelihood -688.968 -1251.365 -1205.01 -2268.364 -3543.695 -3656.045 Pseudo R2 0.0134 0.012 0.004 0.010 0.022 0.014 Note: Models 1 and 4 present the results of binary probit estimation while the rest use ordered probit estimation. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, with clustering by region. ?p < 0.10, ??p < 0.05, ???p < 0.01. Constants from ordered probit estimations are not presented. The question on retrospective, sociotropic evaluations is available only in 2007. For control variables, note that older respondents are consistently pessimistic about their past evaluations and future predictions. They also feel they are not getting ahead of the rest of the population. Another distinction to note is education’s role in economic improvement. In pocketbook evaluations, more educated respondents feel they have been and will be better off economically. Yet their judgment of the national economy is pessimistic both retrospectively and prospectively. Conse- quently, education allows individuals to feel they are better off than the rest of the society, just like migration. To ease the interpretation of the results, I present predicted probabilities of “getting ahead” in Table 4.7. The top-left cell displays the predicted probability of a representative female respondent reporting that her household has been getting ahead with no family members abroad, whereas the bottom left shows the predicted probability of such a report for a respondent with family members abroad. There is a clear difference between the two groups and the feeling of getting ahead appears to be more likely among migrant households. This is also the case for prospective evaluations as seen in the second column of Table 4.7. In sum, these estimation results confirm my hypothesis that migrant households feel they are getting ahead of the rest of the population. This is the result of two types of sentiments where migrant household members consider that their household financial situations have improved and will improve over time, but their assessment of the national economy is either insignificantly different from or even more negative than non-migrant households.

129 Table 4.7: Predicted Probabilities Compared to the Rest of the Society Have Gotten Ahead Will Get Ahead Non-Migrant Household 0.28 0.34 (0.20 0.37) (0.27 0.41) Migrant Household 0.35 0.39 (0.26 0.43) (0.30 0.48) Note: Columns display predicted probabilities with 95% conﬁdence intervals.

4.6 Robustness Checks

Any study examining the impact of migration faces an identiﬁcation problem. Since migration is a costly and risky enterprize, migrants and, by extension, migration households, are self-selected into the process. For my purposes, a estimation bias will occur if unobservable characteristics are both correlated with the decision to migrate and attitudes toward the government. It may be that families who are predisposed to distance themselves from the state are also likely to migrate abroad. If this is the case, what we consider as a treatment may be simply an outcome of selecting individuals and households. Although I have no theoretical reason to believe that households’ unobservable characteristics predetermine the level of reliance on government assistance or the insulation from the domestic economy, I address the issue empirically in the following way. In the absence of experimental data, I opt for an alternative strategy of comparing responses from current and past households. The crux of the identiﬁcation challenge here is that we are not able to control for the unobservables that both

130 Table 4.8: Comparing Former and Current Migrant Households

Will Get Ahead Pocketbook Sociotropic Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

Current Migrant Household 0.276** 0.182** -0.017 (0.112) (0.090) (0.102) Age -0.009** -0.010** -0.002 (0.004) (0.005) (0.003) Female -0.078** 0.133 0.071 (0.035) (0.160) (0.115) Education 0.048*** -0.018 -0.051* (0.018) (0.022) (0.028) Class -0.017 0.140* 0.151*** (0.071) (0.081) (0.024) Employed 0.089 -0.146*** -0.258*** (0.061) (0.050) (0.027) Urban 0.142 0.095 0.027 (0.329) (0.277) (0.199) Year 2003 0.247** -0.039 -0.240*** (0.107) (0.105) (0.042) Constant -0.536 (0.531) cut1 Constant -0.906* -0.483** (0.496) (0.224) cut2 Constant 0.356 0.698** (0.475) (0.283) N 388 388 388 Wald χ2 16.74 9.37 104.62 p > χ2 0.0329 0.0248 0.000 Log pseudo-likelihood -249.069 -400.147 -396.847 Pseudo R2 0.033 0.021 0.017 Note: The sample only includes households with past or current overseas migrant workers with no overlap. Model 1 presents the results of binary probit estimation while Models 2 and 3 show the results of ordered probit estimation. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, with clustering by region. ?p < 0.10, ??p < 0.05, ???p < 0.01. Constants from Models 2 and 3 are from ordered probit estimations.

131 affect migration propensity and domestic insulation when we simply compare current migrant households to the rest of the public. This concern may be mitigated if we compare current migrant households with households that have no migrants at present but had migrants in the past. Since the household characteristics related to migration are likely to be stable over time, the unobservables will be canceled out in the estimation process. Thus, I reestimate the models using a sample limited to current and past migrant households with no overlap between the two. This method is applied only to prospective evaluations of economic conditions due to data limitations. Table 4.8 contains the results of this analysis. It is important to point out that the direction and significance of coefficients for the current migrant households variable are consistent with the original estimation results in Models 4 through 5 of Table 4.6.

4.7 Conclusion

This chapter articulates and attempts to confirm empirically the underlying mechanism of my overall argument. As discussed before, that key mechanism is that migration opportunities and remittance income reduce the importance of government performance, a conceptual proxy to the utility of citizenship, to the well-being of citizens. The evidence from my analysis of Filipino survey data first indicates that households with migrant resources are less reliant on government assistance. From emergency provisions to jobs and skill training, migrant households are more likely to find

132 solutions away from the public sector. In the area of government services, therefore, migration appears to create a distance between citizens and the government. My data also show that, in a broader sense of government performance, migration likewise diminishes the importance of political exchange based on the social contract of democracy. In economic evaluations, migrant households enjoy steady improve- ments in their living standard and, when combined with society-wide assessments, the sense of improvement extends to relative terms. These findings imply that citizens whose economic life is financed by external resources and opportunities should be less engaged in the political process according to the logic of citizenship. Citizens whose well-being is not largely conditioned by how well the government performs have fewer reasons to ensure its success. Within the overall dissertation, this chapter provides empirical support for a key part of a theoretical mechanism and paves the way to the final empirical chapter where I test the observable implications of the causal mechanism. Chapter Two laid out the theoretical framework that “outside options” pose a behavioral challenge to citizens. Migration phenomenon, to an extent, undermines the “ownership” of citizens toward their government where, in familiar terms, citizens are principals while the government is contracted to serve as their agents. Chapter Three examined variance in political participation attributable to migration and found no evidence that migrant households are different in voter turnout, campaign work, or interest in campaign information in any systematic way. Adding the findings of this chapter that migration reduces the importance of citizenship, we have an emerging picture that

133 under high migration, citizens may participate in an equal frequency but with diﬀer- ent “judgments.” The aggregate manifestation of this underlying logic is presented in the next chapter, in a form of retrospective voting.

134 4.8 Appendix

The availability of instruments in the original survey is provided in the parenthesis next the question.

Economic Trend Indicators

Q. [Pocketbook, Retrospective Assessment] Comparing your quality of life these days to how it was 12 months ago, would you say that your quality of life is ...? (A1 in 2002, 2003 and 2007)

1. Better now than 12 months ago

2. Same as before

3. Worse now than 12 months ago

6. Don’t know

7. Refused

Q. [ Pocketbook, Prospective Assessment] In your opinion, what will be the quality of your life in the coming 12 months? Would you say that your quality of life...? (A2 in 2002, 2003 and 2007)

1. Will be better

2. Same

3. Will be worse 135 6. Don’t know

7. Refused

Q. [Sociotropic, Retrospective Assessment] Comparing the economy of the Philip- pines now to the situation about 12 months ago, would you say that it has? (B1 in 2007)

1. Improved

2. Not changed

3. Gotten worse now

8. Don’t know

9. Refused

Q. [Sociotropic, Prospective Assessment] Over the next 12 months, what do you think will happen to the economy of the Philippines? Would you say it will ...? (A3 in 2002 and 2003; C in 2007)

1. Will be better

2. Same

3. Will be worse

6. Don’t know

7. Refused 136 Government Assistance

Q. In the past three months, did your family receive any of the following help? (F17 in 2003; F12 in 2007)

1. Money that was given

2. Money that was lent

3. Food

4. Non-food items

5. Job

6. Support for schooling or training

7. Any kind of service

99. None

Q. From whom did you receive this kind of help? (F18 in 2003; F13 in 2007)

1. Relatives

2. Friends

3. Private person who is not a relative or friend

4. Government

5. Private companies

6. Non-government organizations

137 CHAPTER 5

DOES MOBILITY UNDERMINE ELECTORAL

ACCOUNTABILITY? RETROSPECTIVE VOTING IN

PHILIPPINE PROVINCES

5.1 Introduction

Chapter Two presented a theoretical argument that migration undermines the citizen- government relationship in sending countries by creating disincentives for citizens’ political engagement. In contrast to many of the existing works that highlight ﬁnan- cial and social remittances as a source of citizen empowerment, I argued that these new resources may undermine the social contract of democracy between citizens and the government. The key mechanism for my claim is that as citizens start to consider government functions and services less important to their well-being, they are less likely to enforce representation by monitoring and sanctioning politicians. This manifests itself as an aggregate phenomenon where the electorate in a high-migration environment does not hold the government accountable to the same extent that they would in the absence of migration. The irony, as I explained earlier, is that the

138 financial and social resources that could potentially empower citizens may in fact be a source of disengagement. This chapter tests the empirical implications of my argument about migration’s impact on accountability using a unique dataset of the 2004 Philippine gubernatorial elections. I draw from the theoretical and empirical contributions of retrospective voting that stress the importance of context in explaining variation in the strength of electoral accountability. Specifically, I examine whether the extent to which voters punish or reward incumbent governors electorally on the basis of performance varies by levels of migration. I use four measures of government performance in my analysis: education, fiscal performance, economic growth, and unemployment. To preview the findings, the results of the statistical analysis are consistent with my theoretical predictions: levels of migration shape the magnitude of electoral accountability. In provinces where migration is low, voters are more likely to hold incumbent governors accountable for their performance in office. This is consistent with my argument that, when mobility and access to external resources are limited, citizens recognize that for better or worse their individual well-being is intimately influenced by government effectiveness. In consequence, this translates into a positive relationship between the incumbent’s performance and electoral fortunes. In contrast, in high-migration provinces, the result shows that incumbent performance and electoral fortunes have no significant relationship. In other words, well-performing governors are not necessarily supported in higher rates at the polls; likewise, poorly

139 performing governors are not necessarily punished by voters. The electoral accountability mechanism thus simply does not perform as well under high-migration conditions as under low-migration conditions. The pattern is consistently observed for all measures except income growth, which I discuss later in the chapter. The analysis in this chapter is a rare attempt to examine the electoral impact of international migration in a democracy. Pfutze (2007) linked the electoral support for the dominant party to levels of migration in Mexico, but the scope condition was limited to democratic transition. The literature, therefore, has left unanswered an important question about the impact of migration in the presence of democratic procedures. This distinction is importance because only when formal democratic rules are in place can we meaningfully investigate citizen responses to a social contract. It is only with the voluntary political acts in the presence of free and fair elections, although possibly limited but still qualitatively distinguished from political act under dictatorship, that we can evaluate the extent to which citizens are willing to enforce the contract of representation with the government. The rest of the chapter proceeds as follows. After brieﬂy discussing electoral accountability as an appropriate avenue to analyze the political impact of migration, I present my hypothesis about the relationship between migration and electoral accountability. I then describe the data before turning to the analysis and a discussion of the results.

140 5.2 Migration and Electoral Accountability

I focus on electoral accountability to explore how the migration-induced disengagement effect manifests itself as an aggregate political outcome. Electoral accountability is important in principle because it distinguishes democracy as a political regime where rulers are held accountable by the ruled (Cheibub & Przeworski 1999). More relevant for my analysis, however, electoral accountability has the following two characteristics. First, the magnitude of electoral accountability—the extent to which the incumbents’ electoral fortunes are linked to their performance in office—can serve as an indicator for the extent to which citizens exercise their political rights to enforce representation. Second, the concept of electoral accountability effectively captures the material exchange embedded in the social contract of democracy, which is a central component of my participation model. As discussed in great detail in Chapter Two, political science scholarship shows that voters do not always punish or reward elected officials for their performance. The extensive literature on the connection between an incumbent’s performance and electoral outcomes shows that, beyond the general observation that performance matters for the incumbent’s survival (Key 1966, Ferejohn 1986), electoral accountability often fails to stand up to empirical scrutiny (Cheibub & Przeworski 1999, Fearon 1999, Achen & Bartels 2004). Scholars who study the relationship between government performance and electoral outcomes have converged onto a more nuanced, conditional understanding that the magnitude of electoral sanctions varies

141 by voter characteristics, information availability, and institutional contexts.1 What the retrospective voting literature suggests is that the extent to which voters hold the government accountable depends significantly on the context, especially on how voters define their relationship with the government. This allows us to use the magnitude of retrospective voting to understand citizen behavior in a high-migration setting.2 The resource dimension of the material exchange between citizens and the government, where migration and remittances join the conversation in my framework, is clearly represented in the accountability mechanism. To repeat, elections are an enforcement mechanism, however crude, of a contract of representation between citizens and the government. As such, democratic accountability matters to the extent that such a contract between citizens and the government is substantively meaningful. From citizens’ point of view, the extent to which they seek to monitor and hold the government accountable depends on the perceived utility of this relationship. This is why I argue that migration undermines the extent to which the public holds the government accountable for its performance. Migration is thus a force that un- dercuts the linkage between citizens and their government by introducing external resources and a possibility of exit. The political effect of external resources and opportunities under migration was

1See, for example, Duch and Stevenson (2008).

2It is important to note that my analysis is not concerned with whether electoral accountability matters for the quality of democracy. Likewise, it does not engage in the debate as to whether elections are selection or sanctioning mechanisms.

142 extensively discussed in Chapters One and Two, but it still merits a brief discussion of their nature and characteristics. Remittance income, the most visible outcome of migration, enables citizens to keep the state at a distance. Once migrant households receive remittances from abroad, they seek private substitutes for functions and services that are usually performed by the government. It follows from this that once the role of the government diminishes, the incentives to control the government will ultimately decline no matter how civic-minded individual citizens are. It should be also added that this withdrawal effect is amplified by migration prospects. In many large-scale sending countries such as Mexico and the Philippines, migration spans many decades, or even many generations. This creates a culture of migration where each generation of citizens are expected to leave for opportunities overseas (Asis 2006, Cohen 2004). When migration ceases to be a temporary measure to ease economic or social problems of the day and turns into a built-in feature of the social landscape, citizens may adapt their social behavior to maximize migration’s potential benefits. Individuals who are focused on leaving the country are more likely to have higher discount rates of the future and less likely to be involved in political life. Considering the fact that there are many more people willing to leave than those who are actually abroad, this effect, although unobservable, would be substantial. Therefore, my principal argument is that because migration makes citizens less dependent on the government, citizens affected by migration should not hold the government accountable for its performance to a similar extent than citizens not affected by migration. This leads to the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis: Incumbents are more likely to be rewarded or punished for good

143 or poor performance when migration is low, whereas they are less likely to be subject to electoral sanctions when migration is high.

I remain agnostic about the direction or strength of the contextual eﬀect of migration when migration is high. This is because it is unrealistic to predict that, everything else being equal, voters would reward bad performance and punish good performance under any circumstances. This is an unlikely outcome even when migrant households are insulated from the home country problems. Rather, I expect that the relationship becomes uncertain between government performance and election results in a high-migration setting.

5.3 Data and Measures

I test this hypothesis using data from the 2004 Philippine gubernatorial elections. The Philippines oﬀers a particularly appropriate setting for studying the domestic impact of migration for the following three reasons. First, it is a high-migration country in terms of the pervasiveness of migration and the relative importance of remittances to domestic economy as discussed in Chapter One. Second, the level of migration varies widely across the country, allowing me to exploit variation. Across the 80 provinces of the Philippines, the average migration rate is 11.8 migrants per 1000 persons with a range of 3.3 to 30.8. Third, the Philippines has relatively a well- established experience with democracy, at least in the sense of democratic procedures. Since national-level democratic institutions were introduced almost 100 years ago by the American colonial government, elections at every level of government have been

144 part of the Philippine political life except the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1972- 1986). This institutional characteristic makes the Philippines an interesting case for studying the impact of migration on the implicit contract between citizens and the government in a democracy. The unit of analysis is the “province,” since I utilize subnational variation in performance of the province government. The province is the top level of the Philippines’ three-tiered decentralized government system.3 Provinces are useful for subnational comparative analysis because they are relatively self-contained administrative units in which politics, migration, and economic change can meaningfully play out. The relatively large number of provinces—80 in total—provides acceptable variation in the sample. Furthermore, reliable data on socioeconomic characteristics are available, partly because provincial government’s performance is comparatively easier to measure than municipal governments’ performance. I compile electoral, socioeconomic, ﬁscal, and demographic data associated with the provinces from various public and private sources around the election year of 2004. Due to practical data constraints, I focus my analysis on the 2004 gubernatorial elections, although I also perform supplementary tests using partial data from the 2007 elections.

3The province is divided into municipalities and “component” cities, each of which is further subdivided into barangays, the smallest political unit equivalent to a village. “Independent cities” exist at the same level as the provinces, i.e., they share the same functions and authorities, and are divided directly into barangays. Not to be confused with provinces, the country is divided into 15 administrative regions and most national government departments maintain regional oﬃces. However, these regions (except for the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao) are just administrative subdivisions without elected oﬃcials.

145 Because I use aggregate data to test theories of individual-level voting behavior, a problem of ecological inference arises. Since I am trying to estimate the behavior of specific groups within the province, for instance, voters belonging to a migrant household, many of the concerns about ecological inference should apply. Individual- level data about vote choice of gubernatorial candidates would solve the problem, but such data are not available. I address this problem in indirect ways. In Chapters Three and Four, I presented individual-level survey evidence to show that migrant households are indeed systematically different in a way that predicts less engagement in politics than non-migrant households. This individual level evidence is not perfect, but it still addresses each step of the causal mechanism that links migration to political behavior. Although limited, it should be encouraging that three types of different data point in the same direction when put together.4

5.3.1 Measuring Electoral Outcomes

Throughout the analysis, the dependent variable is the incumbent’s vote share in the gubernatorial election, that is, votes received by the incumbent candidate as a percentage of all votes cast for all candidates. I use election returns from 2004 to construct this variable. The Philippine local elections are held every three years

4It is also possible to extend my theoretical argument and argue that high migration has structural influence. In other words, migration effect is not limited to those directly participating in migration but shapes the society at large. For instance, migration may have a demonstration effect on the community as a whole and those not belonging to a migrant household may change their behavior in expectation of future migration. This is certainly outside the scope of my study but Goodman and Hiskey take this approach (2008).

146 in the same year as national elections.5 The Philippine local elections, including gubernatorial races, are generally competitive—the median number of gubernatorial candidates per province was three for each election of 2001, 2004 and 2007. Electoral competitiveness varies across provinces: for the 2004 election, the margin of victory for winning candidates as a vote share ranged from 0.007 to 1 and the mean was approximately 0.32. In order to justify the use of the incumbents’ vote share as the dependent variable, I need to describe a few important institutional features of Philippine elections. First, I use the individual incumbent politician, not the incumbent party, as the focus of analysis because politics in the Philippines is organized around individual politicians. Partisanship and party systems are weak in Philippine politics, which makes party labels less relevant for citizens’ vote choice. Political parties are highly personalitic and serve particularistic goals, largely devoid of ideological platforms (Hutchcroft & Rocamora 2003). Thus, voters do not expect congruent issue positions from candidates sharing a party label and do not factor the party label in their evaluations, retrospective or prospective, of candidates (Sidel 1999, Simbulan 2005). For this reason, the incumbent’s party label is largely irrelevant for my analysis. Second, using the incumbent’s vote share as a measure for electoral accountability may raise a selection issue. In theory, one can expect that only incumbents who feel conﬁdent about their performance enter the race for reelection. If this is the case, incumbents with poor performance should be less likely to seek reelection, and

5Barangay (village) elections are held in a diﬀerent year.

147 therefore the data of underperforming incumbents will be missing, making it difficult effort to predict the relationship between low performance and vote share. In addition to selection issues, term limits also complicate the use of incumbency. Philippine law allows two consecutive reelections for each individual, and so some incumbent governors may not be on the ballot despite excellent performance. Taken together, these factors truncate the data and may cause estimation biases. These concerns, however, are alleviated by a peculiar trait of Philippine politics: the clan dominance of political offices. The Philippine ruling oligarchy consists of a small number of powerful families—often called a political clan or a dynasty within the country—which have colonial roots and turn out to be quite adaptable to socioeconomic changes over time.6 The competition among rival clans is fierce, frequently escalating into pre-election bloodshed (Conde 2009b), because their access to political power is crucial to their success in economic and social domains. Major business and financial enterprises are also organized as family conglomerates (Hutchcroft 1994). There have been several attempts to reform the oligopoly of power in elected offices, but in the current 15th Congress, which formed after the May 2010 general elections, 74%, or 170 of the 229 members of representatives in the Lower House, belong to political families and 18 of the 23 senators are members of political families (Tiongson-Mayrina 2010). This clan domination has two implications for my analysis. First, since politicians

6“In every province of the whole country, the ruling elite families ... continue to lord over not only the political life but also the economic and social life of the common people... The elite’s hold on power is practically hereditary...” (Simbulan 2005, p.xix).

148 operate as members of political clans in highly competitive environments, electoral presence is the default option; the decision to contest in an election is therefore less inﬂuenced by a concern for the performance-centered accountability. Indeed, in my sample, 64 sitting governors out of 80 provinces campaigned in 2004.7 Furthermore, the widespread practice of family candidates helps to loosen the constraints posed by term limits for analytical purposes. In practice, a large number of incumbent politicians, at every level of government—from members of the House of Representatives down to village captains—dodge term limits by using a family candidate. The candidate is either a de facto surrogate for the incumbent who will pull the strings behind the scenes or he or she is a candidate who is a family heir continuing the reign of the dynasty. Family candidates span all branches of a family tree, most frequently coming from spouses, but include siblings, children, cousins, in-laws, and even godchildren (Head 2007, Teehankee 2002). The fact that these candidates are an extension of the incumbent politician is heavily featured in election campaigns.8 In theory, the practice of family candidates makes term limits a less rigid institutional constraint than commonly thought, although the performance is likely to

729 incumbents sought reelection in 2001 and 51 did so in 2007.

8This logic is presented in the words of the outgoing governor of Bulacan who had been completing three terms and was campaigning for her brother: “[t]o ensure that all I have worked for will not go to waste, I have allowed my brother, I have requested him, to follow me and vie for the post of governor”(Olarte 2007).

149 be discounted for electoral support when a family candidate runs.9 Since most of these cases can be identiﬁed by the candidate’s family name, except a few occa- sions where extended family members or godchildren step in, I construct a separate measure that takes into consideration this practice. My own analysis shows that there were 9 family candidates in 2004.10 Taken together, it shows that in 2004, 85% of all provinces saw either sitting governors or their family members running for gubernatorial seats.11

5.3.2 Measuring Government Performance

In measuring government performance, the conventional approach that uses the level of basic service delivery is problematic. High public sector spending may not necessarily indicate a job well done but rather potentially reﬂect patronage, clientelistic practices, or in the worse case, downright corruption (Hicken & Simmons 2008).12

9It should be noted that, to ensure unbiased estimation, what is relevant is the decision to run, not the incumbent’s electoral performance.

10The number is 17 out of 80 in the 2007 elections.

11Models using family candidate variables do not produce the eﬀect of the same magnitude. The direction of signs are largely consistent with original model but the standard errors are much larger. Note that the logic of family candidacy addresses the problem posed by term limits but does not necessarily guarantee electoral support for the candidate. It is more likely that voters discount their evaluation of the incumbent when dealing with a surrogate. Thus, the eﬀect is likely to be muted compared to the incumbent him or herself.

12A study on the Philippine gubernatorial elections ﬁnd that higher spending on “local development” increased the likelihood that incumbent governors get reelected in the 1990s (Solon, Fabella & Capuno 2009). The concern here is that the measure of local development is the share of government expenditure on development-related programs and it does not include any

150 Furthermore, conventional measures of infrastructure, a primary measure of “public goods provision,” may in fact include outcomes of privately provided services. In their analysis of remittances’s effects on basic services in Mexican municipalities, Adida and Girod find that migrant households increased access to clean water and sanitation through private solutions without relying on government-provided services (2011). Yet in the usual data gathering practices, this is likely to be credited as government performance. With these caveats in mind, I employ two broad sets of measures for analysis: education performance and local revenue generation. It is important to note that I take these measures as symptomatic of overall government performance. I do not claim that voters are particularly knowledgeable about, for example, the trends of school enrollment over the years. In a similar vein, I do not expect voters to follow how much local governments make an effort to develop local revenue sources, improve their taxation capabilities, or rationalize their accounting system. Rather, these measures should indicate the general quality of public administration and voters might realistically be expected to have some idea about the well-being of their province both through direct and indirect experiences. For the purposes of my analysis, it is equally important to emphasize that I do not distinguish incompetence from corruption or vice versa.13 Any deviation from good

considerations of policy impact. This makes the measure vulnerable to the criticisms discussed here.

13Poor governance is a systemic challenge to the Philippine state. According to the 2002 World Bank Indicators, the Philippines ranked at the 53th percentile of 213 countries for government eﬀectiveness, 37th percentile for rule of law, and 41th percentile for control of corruption. This

151 representation—shirking, incompetence, or pilferage of public coﬀers—is considered poor performance in my framework. The distinction could be important in other research contexts, but it is less relevant for my purposes.

Education Performance I use the change in enrollment in primary and high schools as the ﬁrst proxy for government performance for the following reasons. First, education is considered a major government service area by voters in developing countries and consequently is given a high priority by politicians. Although the Philippine education system has remained centralized—notably in personnel control—compared to other government service sectors, provincial and municipal governments still account for local variation in education outcomes by maintaining their own education programs. Local governments secure their own education funding from the Special Education Fund (SEF), which consists of the proceeds of a 1% tax on the assessed values of real properties and also supplements SEF in ﬁnancing the education sector (Philippine Institute for Development Studies 2007). Second, education provides a fertile ground for bloated state bureaucracy and elite capture, which results in high variation in outcomes. Politicians can manipulate education spending, like any other government spending, for particularistic ends.14

performance is disappointing in absolute terms, but even within the region, it lags behind Thai- land, a frequent reference point for the Philippines, which ranked 63th, 62th, and 47th percentiles for the same category (Kaufmann, Kraay & Mastruzzi 2009). The references year 2002 was chosen to be informative for the empirical analysis of this study, which uses data from 2002 and 2003.

14An oﬃcial of the department of education pointed out that “it is common practice among local oﬃcials to distribute school supplies and bags bearing their names to students before the opening of the classes.” (Llanto 2010)

152 Hicken and Simmons (2008) show that political particularism indeed undermines the marginal effect of increased education spending on education outcomes, in their case, literacy. For analysis, I take the difference between the province-level percentage of children ages 7 to 16 who attended school in 2002 and 2004.15 Data were obtained through the Philippine Human Development Report (2009).16 For controls specific to the education model, I include the change in tax revenue in the total income of the provincial government since there is no a priori theoretical reason why voters should prefer improved education outcomes irrespective of tax burdens.17 I also include school enrollment in the baseline year of 2001.

Local Revenue Generation The second measure of government performance is local revenue generation. Although decentralization in 1991 provided local governments with greater power and access to resources in order to ﬁnance their operation,

15This covers all stages of primary and secondary education. The Philippine high school is two years shorter than most countries. The Philippines has a high dropout rate but a priori there are no theoretical reasons to expect that dropout rates trend in different directions from enrollment rates—social, economic, and political characteristics conducive to higher enrollment rates should contribute to lower dropout among students. Besides, province-level dropout rates are not available. Nevertheless, I estimated province-level dropout rates from region-level data and included it in models for robustness checks assuming provincial boundaries are not correlated with government performance. The results do not differ significantly.

16Further details are provided in the data appendix.

17A better measure of tax burden for the government education performance—the costs for tax payers—would be the change in property tax (millage) rate. Yet the real property tax rates have hardly changed over the last decade.

153 the tax assignment system in the Philippines is such that most taxes are centrally collected and locally distributed. The national government still has a monopoly over individual and corporate income taxes, customs duties, value-added tax, and excise taxes on alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, and petroleum products. As a result, provinces, cities, and municipalities are all heavily dependent on the intergovernmental fiscal transfers, known as the “Internal Revenue Allotment” (IRA). A typical provincial government received only 11% of its revenue from local sources during the last decade and there is no sign of system-wide improvement.18 Scholars and local officials point out problems with the allotment formula (Manasan 2005), but it is also true that most local governments fail to exploit their own tax base to the maximum extent. For instances, the average collection rate of real property taxes—a major source of local tax revenue—ranged from 27% to 40% in the 2003–2008 period according to my data.19 For the purposes of my analysis, this institutional constraint uniformly applied to all provinces allows us to take advantage of variation in local revenue generation as an indicator of government performance. Despite the widespread dependence on intergovernmental transfers, it is reasonable to argue that a well-functioning local government with an eye on better service delivery and efficient operation would be more effective at developing and taking advantage of locally available revenue sources.

18The value represents the median calculated by my analysis of local ﬁscal statistics from 2001 to 2008. Share of local tax revenues is even lower at 4%.

19Data are from the Statement of Income and Expenditures of Local Governments 2003–2008 from Department of Finance.

154 Therefore, I construct the second measure of government performance using local revenue, that is, by taking the diﬀerence in the share of locally generated revenue to the total income for the province government.20 Since revenue may also be aﬀected by local economic conditions, I include it in the increase in per capita income over the three-year period as a control.

Economic Performance Economic change under the incumbent’s watch is another important consideration in voters’ decisions at the polls. It is relatively well established in the US context that good economic conditions beneﬁt the incumbent president and congressional party in general (Erikson 1989), but evidence concerning gubernatorial elections is mixed (Peltzman 1990). Moving to cross-national settings, the linkage between economic performance and the incumbent’s survival becomes more complicated (Cheibub & Przeworski 1999). While my project does not directly engage debate on economic voting—the importance of diﬀerent measures of the economy, the prevalence of “sociotropic” and “pocketbook” voting, and macro-level, aggregate economic conditions and micro-level, survey-based evaluations—it proceeds

20Technically, an increase in local share of revenues can occur as a result of cuts in national transfers. However, transfers are decided according to a preset allotment formula that has remained same since 1992. 40% of national internal revenues go to local governments and of the 40%, the provinces will get 23%; cities, 23%; municipalities, 34%; and barangays (villages), 20%. Each individual province, city, town, or barangay in turn gets a share according to an allocation formula based on population (50% weight), land area (25%) and an equal sharing component (25%) (Manasan 2005). Considering the fact that changes in land area or legal status are rare, and the latest census was done in 2000, it is unlikely there were any cuts speciﬁc to a province between 2001 and 2004.

155 with a basic assumption that voters have some understanding that economic conditions are an indicator of how the province government improved or harmed the general welfare of its people. It is important to note that economic development, particularly at the subnational level, may have a different quality as an indicator of good performance compared to education and fiscal performance. The difference hinges on to what extent voters consider local governments to be directly responsible for government outcomes. Local governments are frequently primary service providers of education and health services in many developing countries and this is certainly the case in the Philippines. By definition, fiscal performance is an effective indicator of organizational capacity. In contrast, at the province level, economic conditions are more removed from the direct control of governors. There are numerous national and even global factors that determine the local economy. It is therefore reasonable to argue that voters should have fewer difficulties judging the incumbent with service and fiscal performances than province-level economic conditions. Therefore, I estimate economic performance models separately from the other performance indicators. The literature on economic voting typically considers changes in personal income, unemployment, and inflation as measures of economic conditions. I do not consider inflation for the present analysis, because it has little within-country variation and reliable data are not available. Therefore, I examine whether voters reward income growth and punish unemployment differently under different levels of migration. I use the change in inflation-adjusted personal income and unemployment rates from the

156 Philippine Human Development Report (2009).21 As in any other countries, governors in the Philippines give a high priority to economic development. Income growth is essential to this process, and they devote political resources to job creation, highly publicizing their accomplishments. For controls speciﬁc to economic performance models, I include the share of social spending to the total expenditure in order to account for the government service that may mitigate the impact of unemployment on households (social, housing, labor, and health services).

5.3.3 Measuring Migration

The theory developed in Chapter Two points to the importance of migration in shaping voters’ incentives to make judgements about the incumbent’s quality. I make two theoretical decisions about how to conceptualize and measure migration in this project. First, I examine the overall impact of migration. For my purposes, the exit of migrants, remittances, and migration prospects for those remaining behind all constitute a single phenomenon that reduces citizens’ stake in the political community. Second, following the first decision, I take a view that migration is more or less a structural condition that shapes the citizen-government relationship and is thus less affected by short-term fluctuations in migrant numbers or remittance volume. Given that migration has been a prominent social phenomenon in the Philippines for decades, Filipino citizens may be likely to form long-term expectations about

21The coverage and quality of subnational data is less than ideal, especially in developing countries. Although I need to take a difference in personal income and unemployment in the 2001-2004 period, province-level unemployment figures from 2004 are missing. Thus, I use 2003 figures in place of 2004 in estimation.

157 migration and to ignore year-to-year changes in migration pattern when considering their relationship with the government on the basis of migration. As a measure of migration, I use province-level migration rates, migrants per 1000 persons (migrants and residents combined), calculated from the Philippines 2000 Census of Population and Housing. The 2000 Census identifies how many members of the household are abroad as migrant workers. For my purposes, the Census figures underestimate the migration phenomenon because they register only short-term migrants and fail to capture the inflows of remittances and information from extended family members. Nonetheless, since there are no theoretical reasons to believe that the underestimation of the size of migration are correlated with the dependent variable, change in government performance, this should not bias the estimation results. I do not use remittances as a measure of migration for the present analysis. The absence of reliable data at the province level is the primary reason. Furthermore, migration rates may be a better indicator than remittances for the following theoretical reason. Returning back to the theoretical model, migration entails two conceptually distinct but empirically interrelated mechanisms. The first is a direct effect on migrant households in which external resources and networks allow household members to opt out of government services, a choice leading to political disengagement. Sec- ond, the expectation effect operates at the society level. High migration prospects

158 can change citizens’ behavior even when some individuals may not be part of migration network at present. This expectation effect is not unobservable but is likely to track migration rates and/or remittance inflows.22 My hypothesis is that migration influences electoral accountability within a province, but one may argue that migration and accountability pose a simultaneity problem. That is, limited electoral accountability may encourage people to migrate overseas. Politicians may adjust their performance in anticipation of migration and its likely impact on their vote share. Furthermore, they may influence policies on migration or remittances and thereby adjust their job performance. This issue should not be a major concern because province governments do not set migration policies or col- lect taxes on incoming remittances. The central government, on the other hand, is heavily involved in the overseas placement of Filipino workers. Alternatively, there may be unobservable—historical or cultural—factors that drives both migration and low accountability. One can speculate that historical events that happened at the beginning of the 20th century—when mass migration from the Northern Philippines to Hawaii started and the US introduced local elections for the first time in the Philippines—may put the country on certain political trajectories. Nonetheless, it might be helpful to point out that although migration

22I have constructed partial province-level remittance models based on the 2000 and 2003 rounds of the Survey on Overseas Filipinos. I then reestimated all accountability models using remittances in place of migration rates. Remittance models failed to produce significant results. The directions of the coefficients are consistent with migration models, but they are insignificant. Clearly, we need better data but one can speculate that migration’s political impact may not linearly reflect the dollar-to-dollar substitution for government services. Rather, the fact that a household or a community has a certain number of migrants may have qualitative effect on members’ political considerations.

159 out of the Philippines and local elections began a hundred years ago, decentralization was suspended during the Martial Law period of 1972 to 1986. Emigration never stopped during this period, but local elections did not resume until 1992, ﬁve years after the democratic transition.

5.3.4 Additional Control Variables

Although my ability to deal with biases introduced by unobservable variables using observational data, absent an appropriate instrument, is limited, the fact that I use the change in performance over time as the dependent variable should alleviate some concerns for controls. To estimate the conditional impact of migration on electoral accountability, I include the following control variables that might affect migration, government performance, and electoral outcomes. I already discussed control variables specific to each measure of government performance above, so here I focus on additional controls that are common across all model specifications. It is worth noting the importance of change in tax revenue as a key control variable. There is no a priori theoretical reason why voters prefer improved governance outcomes regardless of tax burdens. Other types of tax-related variables—for example, property tax rate change—might be a better measure of tax burdens on citizens. Yet, in the Philippines, the linkage between local taxation and government performance is rather tenuous. Besides, the real property and business tax rates have hardly changed over the last decade. This makes tax revenue ratio the best

160 alternative. I also include the share of unaccounted spending in total expenditure as an indicator of general incompetence of the incumbent administration.23 Next, in order to control for the voter assessment of performance based on macroeconomic trends, I include in the model personal income growth and baseline income. I calculate the percentage change in real per capita province personal income over three years ending with the election year. Province-level income gini index is used as a proxy for income inequality. The overall political environment of the province is captured by two variables. The first one is armed conflict, which measures the level of insurgency in the province by using the number of armed encounters in the province during the last two decades. The Philippines has serious security problems posed by Communist insurgents and Islamist separatist movements in many parts of the country. For a more immediate assessment of the political climate around the elections, I also use the number of election-related incidents, including killings. More than 200 people were killed in various shootings and clashes related to the polls in 2004 (Conde 2009a). Finally, I include the log of the total province population. There might be some unobservable effect related to the size of the public on the relationship between citizens and the government. Table 5.1 presents summary statistics for all the variables discussed above. The data sources are provided in the appendix.

23To make the presentation simple, I do not include this unaccounted spending variable in governance performance models. The results, however, are similar when it is included.

161 Table 5.1: Summary Statistics Variable Mean Std. Dev. N Incumbent vote share 0.64 0.2 62 Migration (Migrants per 1000 persons) 11.79 6.2 77 Change in primary and secondary -1.11 4.04 77 school enrollment Baseline school enrollment 90.67 3.59 77 Change in local revenue as a share of income 0 0.05 79 Local revenue in base year 0.11 0.11 79 Change in tax revenue as a share of income 0.43 1.5 79 Change in unemployment rate 0.56 1.86 77 Base year unemployment 9.33 3.47 77 Social spending share 0.23 0.1 79 Change in unaccounted spending 0.09 0.14 79 as a share of expenditure Change in per capita income 0.03 0.17 77 Income Gini Index 40.87 5.18 77 Armed conﬂict 0.68 0.77 73 Election violence 2.93 3.68 82 Province population (logged) 13.18 0.92 80 Per capita income (1996 pesos) 22622.17 5810.12 77

162 5.4 Analysis

The hypothesis to emerge from my theoretical argument is that migration conditions the extent to which voters reward and punish incumbents for their performance. Following Berry and Howell (2007), I take a relatively direct approach to testing this hypothesis and posit the following interaction model:

Vote Share = α + β1∆Performance + β2Migration

+ β3(∆Performance ∗ Migration) + β4∆Tax + βX + (5.4.1)

where Vote Share is the vote share for the incumbent; Performance indicates one of the measures of government performance employed for the analysis; and Tax denotes the share of the provincial government income coming from tax revenue. X refers to a set of controls while is a white-noise stochastic term.24 What are the expected signs of the coeﬃcients? The marginal impact of a unit increase in government performance is β1 + β3Migration. This implies that the overall eﬀect of past performance on the vote share of the incumbent is determined

24To keep the discussion as simple as possible, parsimonious models are reported below. I have estimated, however, a wide range of alternative models that control for province characteristics including per capita education spending, a change in education spending, a change in social spending, and income inequality. The overwhelming weight of the evidence is consistent with the results presented below. Another issue of concern is functional forms. The implicit assumption of this interaction model is that the conditional effect of migration is linear, which makes it impossible to model migration’s effect differently at different migration levels. Nonetheless, I stay with the simplest assumption in the absence of theoretical guidance.

163 Table 5.2: Expected Coeﬃcients Variable Expected Sign

Test 1 Increase in school enrollment (+) School * Migration (-)

Test 2 Increase in local revenue generation (+) Revenue * Migration (-)

Test 3 Increase in personal income (+) Income * Migration (-)

Test 4 Increase in unemployment (-) Unemployment * Migration (+)

by two coefficients associated with performance and migration. I do not have any theoretical reason to think that the migration rate in itself determines the incumbent’s vote share. Therefore, I remain agnostic about the direction and significance of the coefficient for the migration variable. According to the theory, good performance—indicated by an increase in school enrollment, local revenue generation, and personal income—should increase electoral support for the incumbent in principle, and, as such, the coefficient on the performance variable should be positive. As migration increases, I predict that performance is less likely to be important in voters’ calculus. Thus, the coefficient on the interaction term between these variables is expected to be negative. On the other hand, poor performance, captured by an increase in unemployment, should reflect poorly on the incumbent, and the coefficient on the unemployment change variable should be negative. Again, migration dilutes the importance of government performance to voters, and the coefficient for

164 Table 5.3: Performance and Incumbent’s Vote Share, by Migration

Migration Overall Low High

Increase in School Enrollment 0.005 0.059 -0.096 No. of Obs. 60 31 29 Increase in Local Share of Revenue 0.103 0.321* 0.075 No. of Obs. 62 32 30 Increase in Income 0.11 -0.009 0.2 No. of Obs. 60 31 29 Increase in Unemployment -0.014 -0.352* 0.151 No. of Obs. 60 31 29 Note: Pair-wise correlation ∗p < 0.10.

the interaction term is expected to be positive. These predictions are summarized in Table 5.2. Before proceeding to multivariate statistical analysis, I present the correlation matrix in Table 5.3 to illustrate that performance does not always operate similarly in different migration settings. In provinces with low migration levels, the association of performance with the incumbent’s vote share is significant in local revenue and unemployment while it fails to register statistical significance in school enrollment and income. With the exception of income growth, the direction of the coefficients are all consistent with my expectations. Since I am dealing with a relatively small sample (approximately N =60), multivariate statistical analysis may help to better understand relationships.

165 5.4.1 Governance Performance

Table 5.4 presents the main results in a series of four models. In each set of a performance measure, a baseline model is matched with an interaction model that includes migration and the interaction term of migration and the chosen performance variable. For clarity of presentation, I discuss governance and economic performance in separate subsections. I start my discussion with a look at increased school enrollment and the results of the 2004 gubernatorial elections. Model 1 presents the regression results for the baseline model without migration and its interaction with education performance. Note that improvement in school enrollment has no significant effect on the vote share of the incumbent. This may indicate that performance may not have the same effect on electoral outcomes across different levels of migration, and including migration helps to reveal the importance of context. In contrast, Model 2 clearly supports the migration hypothesis. Here, the coefficient on school enrollment improvement is positive and significant, which indicates that when migration equals 0, good performance increases electoral reward for the incumbent. The coefficient for the interaction term is negative, suggesting that the marginal effect of performance decreases as migration increases.25

25For alternative education performance models, I also consider school dropout rates. Province- level data are unavailable, so I used regional (14 administrative regions) data assuming variation in dropout is small within a region. My analysis shows that dropout rates are closely correlated with enrollment rates (correlation coeﬃcient is around 0.56). The two are highly collinear, suggesting that dropout rates are unlikely to behave in the opposite direction of enrollment. When I include regional dropout rates in the regression models, the dropout variable slightly absorbs the eﬀects of enrollment.

166 Table 5.4: Eﬀects of Performance and Migration on Incumbent Vote Shares

Education Local Revenue Baseline Interaction Baseline Interaction (1) (2) (3) (4)

Migration (Migrants per 1000 persons) 0.009* 0.011*** (0.005) (0.004) Change in school enrollment 0.009 0.036** (0.006) (0.014) Change in school enrollment -0.003** ×Migration rate (0.001) Change in local revenue (share of income) 0.092 3.146** (0.666) (1.162) Change in local revenue -0.215** ×Migration rate (0.081) Baseline school enrollment -0.008 -0.012 (0.013) (0.014) Local revenue in base year -0.615 -0.826 (0.602) (0.607) Change in tax revenue (share of income) -0.026 -0.010 -0.026 -0.052* (0.021) (0.024) (0.026) (0.027) Change in unaccounted spending -0.218 -0.101 -0.140 -0.058 (0.204) (0.235) (0.217) (0.213) Change in per capita income 0.044 0.199 0.100 0.107 (0.186) (0.186) (0.212) (0.168) Per capita income (pesos) 0.000 -0.000 0.000 0.000 (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) Armed conﬂict 0.042** 0.046 0.034* 0.042** (0.019) (0.031) (0.017) (0.018) Election violence -0.010** -0.014** -0.012** -0.011* (0.004) (0.005) (0.005) (0.006) Province population (logged) 0.032 0.018 0.079* 0.076* (0.029) (0.030) (0.041) (0.042) Constant 0.799 1.438 -0.508 -0.579 (1.209) (1.249) (0.589) (0.612)

No. of Observations 56 55 56 55 No. of Regions 16 16 16 16 R2 0.180 0.272 0.181 0.286 Note: Entries are OLS coeﬃcients estimated. Robust standard errors in parentheses, with clustering by region. ?p < 0.10, ??p < 0.05, ???p < 0.01.

167 Moving to local revenue generation, similar patterns are observed. Model 3 shows that the increased share of local income has no significant effect on the electoral support for the incumbent in the absence of migration. The increase in the organizational capacity of the provincial government is apparently not felt and appreciated by the electorate. Model 4, however, presents a more nuanced story, which is consistent with my argument. The coefficient of the interaction of local revenue and migration is significant and negative, suggesting the marginal utility of performance also decreases as the migration level increases.

(a) Education Performance (b) Local Revenue Generation

Figure 5.1: Electoral Accountability at Diﬀerent Migration Levels (DV = Incumbent Vote Shares)

Based on the the estimates from Table 5.4, Figure 5.1 provides an illustration of the interaction between migration and government performance. It plots the

168 estimated effect of performance on the vote share of the incumbent in provinces ex- periencing different levels of migration. The average migration rate for all provinces calculated from the Census is 12 persons per 1000 and, in the graphs, the migration levels are bounded by 33 per 1000 persons (1000 persons include the sum of migrants and residents), reflecting the range of my data. I also plot the estimated 95% confidence intervals to show the degree of uncertainty of estimation. Substantively, Figure 5.1(a) demonstrates that, in low-migration provinces, improvement in school enrollment, with controls in place, leads to electoral reward for the incumbent; the same effect, however, disappears in high-migration provinces. The second graph, Figure 5.1(b), using local revenue generation, also shows similar patterns. The marginal effect of local revenue efforts on electoral support for the incumbent is positive and significant only when migration is low (below average), to be precise. As migration increases, the confidence intervals around the marginal effect are on either side of the 0 line, and we are unable to reject the null hypothesis that the marginal effect of performance on the incumbent’s vote share is 0. Overall, the analysis of government performance generates a consistent set of findings, revealing that migration-induced political disengagement is a significant predictor of the strength of electoral accountability.

5.4.2 Economic Performance

The economic performance models have similar speciﬁcations to the governance models. Table 5.5 presents these results. Model 1 shows that, in the absence of migration, a rise in unemployment is not signiﬁcantly associated with electoral support for the

169 sitting governor. Model 2 includes migration rate and an interaction between unemployment change and migration. The coefficient for employment is now negative and significant, indicating that when migration is 0, employment undermines electoral support for the incumbent governor. The coefficient for the interaction term is positive and significant, indicating that the marginal effect of employment declines in the presence of migration. To better gauge support for my hypothesis, Figure 5.2 displays the marginal effect of unemployment on elections at different levels of migration. This Figure shows that electoral punishment associated with rising unemployment is present only when migration is low. The marginal effect of unemployment on the incumbent’s vote share is positive, which means electoral punishment declines as migration rises. The upward slope of the marginal effect line is consistent with my expectation that voters are more likely to respond to government performance when migration is low in the electorate. The confidence interval follows the earlier patterns that the relationship is better estimated in a low-middle migration environment. This unemployment model also offers support for the causal mechanism of my overall argument. An increase in unemployment is less punishable in the eye of a voter when his or her household income and his or her own employment prospects are largely determined by an overseas labor market. As such, citizens connected to migration, either through remittances or the possibility of future exit, would not have an incentive to hold the government accountable to the same extent as citizens whose well-being solely resides within the home country. Remember that the theoretical insight behind the migration-accountability linkage is that the availability of exit

170 Table 5.5: Eﬀects of Economic Conditions on Incumbent Vote Shares, by Migration

Unemployment Income Growth Baseline Interaction Baseline Interaction Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

Migration (Migrants per 1000 persons) -0.005 0.008 (0.008) (0.005) Change in unemployment rate 0.011 -0.111** (0.015) (0.048) Change in unemployment 0.012* ×Migration rate (0.006) Change in per capita income 0.260 0.176 (0.170) (0.370) Income growth 0.005 ×Migration rate (0.031) Base year unemployment -0.011* -0.005 (0.006) (0.008) Base year income 0.000 -0.000 0.000 0.000 (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) Change in tax revenue (share of income) -0.038 -0.018 -0.026 -0.024 (0.028) (0.020) (0.025) (0.025) Social spending share -0.153 -0.345 -0.293 -0.228 (0.349) (0.308) (0.377) (0.342) Change in unaccounted spending -0.221 -0.456* -0.277 -0.242 (0.218) (0.231) (0.207) (0.218) Armed conﬂict 0.023 0.020 0.029 0.039** (0.019) (0.016) (0.016) (0.016) Election violence -0.012** -0.014* -0.010** -0.010* (0.005) (0.007) (0.004) (0.005) Province population (logged) 0.060* 0.070* 0.043 0.038 (0.034) (0.033) (0.029) (0.030) Constant -0.007 -0.057 0.069 0.084 (0.474) (0.411) (0.412) (0.407)

No. of Observations 60 59 55 55 No. of Regions 16 16 16 16 R2 0.124 0.311 0.145 0.184 Note: Entries are OLS coeﬃcients estimated. Robust standard errors in parentheses, with clustering by province. ?p < 0.10, ??p < 0.05, ???p < 0.01.

171 Figure 5.2: Economic Voting at Diﬀerent Levels of Migration (DV = Incumbent Vote Shares)

orients citizens away from the home country politics, as how well the government protects and provides for citizens becomes less important. Unlike unemployment, income growth has no observable impact on electoral accountability. The signs of the coeﬃcients are not consistent with the prediction and, more importantly, they are not signiﬁcant. Although the importance of income growth has been widely regarded as a powerful predictor of, for example, US presidential election outcomes (Erikson 1989), the relationship is not universally supported in cross-national or subnational settings (Cheibub & Przeworski 1999). It may be that citizens are more likely to link province-level jobs creation to the incumbent governor but are less likely to do so with income growth, for which they may instead hold the national government responsible.

172 5.5 Conclusion

My theory argues that international migration weakens, for better or worse, the interdependence between citizens and the government. As the home economy and the government become less relevant for the well-being of migrant households, incentives to control the government declines. In consequence, the electorate in a high-migration setting are less keen on keeping well-performing representatives in office and casting bad ones out. As a result, democratic accountability suffers. I have tested this prediction using a unique dataset from the Philippines developed for this project, which represents a novel approach to the connection between global labor mobility and a domestic political process. The evidence from my analysis provides the first glimpse of how international migration may affect the electoral behavior of citizens in a democracy. The main finding is that elections are more likely to function as an accountability mechanism when migration is limited. Under low migration, incumbent governors who increased school enrollment and local fiscal revenue and lowered unemployment receives more votes. In contrast, the linkage between the performance of the incumbent and electoral results has no statistically significant relationship under high migration. The results are consistent with my prediction that high levels of migration decrease the extent to which voters reward and punish the incumbents for their past performance. As discussed earlier, my analysis uses aggregate-level data to support an individual- level argument and thus it is vulnerable to the ecological inference problem. In the absence of reliable individual-level vote choice data, I attempted to mitigate the problem by bringing together other types of indirect evidence. In Chapter Three,

173 I showed that migration does not change the frequency of electoral participation and therefore if migration does have any effect on participation it should fall on vote choice. In Chapter Four, I provided evidence that migrant households are less likely to rely on the government for economic assistance and feel insulated from the economic conditions of the home country, confirming my causal mechanism of the decline in the importance of social contract of democracy. These two forms of individual-level data, therefore, support my claim that the aggregate electoral results reflect individual choices consistent with my theory.

174 5.6 Appendix

Table 5.6: Data Sources Variable Source

Migration Rate The Philippines 2000 Census of Population and Housing

Election Returns 2001, 2004 and 2007 National and Local Elections, Commission on Elections, Records and Statistics Division

Election Violence 2004 and 2007 Election Related Violent Incidents, The Philippine National Police

Provincial Governance The Statement of Income and Expenditures, The Department of Finance, Bureau of Local Government Finance, Various Years

Socioeconomic Variables The Philippine Human Development Report, Various Years

175 CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION

How does increased mobility affect the democratic relationship between citizens and the government? This dissertation has offered a new theoretical framework and empirical understanding for studying the politics in a mobile world. It has shown that a focus on citizens’ incentives in the political process produces better analytic outcomes than an emphasis on resources. In all, this study has presented a simple but convincing picture of citizen behavior under migration. The first section will briefly review the findings and explore what they mean from a broader perspective. Because these findings point to negative effects of migration, I discuss normative implications of this study in the second section. The third section will discuss future research agenda. The final section concludes.

6.1 Discussion of Findings

I began by laying out a coherent theoretical framework to analyze political consequences of international migration. In response to the resource-centered accounts of previous studies, I drew attention to incentives to engage in political action. I

176 highlighted that the increasingly popular view that resource inflows induced by migration will lead to citizen empowerment is misguided because it ignores a possibility that resource inflows may trigger a secondary effect of reducing incentives. The external nature of remittance income is key to this causal linkage because political autonomy it creates may undermine the necessary interdependence between citizens and the government a healthy democracy requires. My incentive-centered argument predicted that a lower “stake” in society will lead to lower demand for accountable government in a high-migration polity. As citizens consider the government as less relevant to their well-being, monitoring and sanctioning politicians according to the fundamental principle of democracy—do they serve the public?—may be less pressing than otherwise. I also discussed my theoretical argument in the tradition of the safety valve hypothesis. My analytical framework sheds new lights on this conventional wisdom and helps to appreciate it in new terms. In Chapter Three, which is my first empirical chapter, I explored the linkage between migration and participation. Contrary to previous findings, migration neither promotes nor suppresses participation. In my analysis, financial remittances make no difference in various types of electoral participation. Although more resources are available, citizens from migrant households do not vote, volunteer, or follow campaign information in higher levels than citizens with no migration connection. Put differently, more resources simply do not lead to more participation in my data. Social remittances—idea diffusion from well-established democracies—also fail to increase any forms of participation under study. Despite widespread rhetoric about political learning overseas, the evidence does not support the social remittance hypothesis.

177 Would it be possible that the null findings are due to the fact that participation is already considerably high in the Philippines? The level of political participation in the Philippines is high even for a developing country, where high expectations of the government usually lead to active participation if allowed. The voter turnout in the 2004 Philippine presidential elections was 85.1%, while the turnout in 2000 presidential elections in Mexico, from which most previous studies use data, was 63.96% (International Foundation for Electoral Systems 2010). Resolving this issue will need cross-national analysis, but it should be pointed out that this evidence still fits with other types of data I presented on the Philippines, as findings from later chapters showed. As a matter of fact, previous findings from Mex- ican cases support my theoretical argument. Various works document that migrant households have lower levels of participation than non-migrant households while they increase involvement in civic organizations (Goodman & Hiskey 2008, Perez- Armendariz & Crow 2010). Then a question arises: Even if citizens in high-migration countries come to possess more financial resources and more democratic attitudes and values, what are the political implications if they disengage from institutional politics? It may be possible that international migration increases the economic importance of associational life and challenges the government monopoly in local governance through household and collective remittances. Yet it appears that the external nature of this change may sever the connection between a rich civic life and political participation, which is precisely the argument of this dissertation. In Chapter Four, I turned to more direct evidence of my disincentive hypothesis.

178 I attempted to estimate the extent of “private solutions” associated with migration while examining the subjective assessment of the household’s insulation from the home economy. This analysis is essential to my micrologic that migrant households face disincentives to control the government for self-interested reasons. I found that migrant households are less reliant on government for economic services and they consider themselves better off than the rest of society both retrospectively and prospectively. The results suggest that migration increases independence from the state in both objective and subjective terms. Having found evidence that citizens see lower utility of citizenship under migration, I moved on to an analysis of retrospective voting data from gubernatorial elections. Here I examined aggregate data of government performance, migration levels, and vote shares of the incumbent. I found that the effect of government performance, in areas of education, fiscal capacity, employment, and income growth, on electoral support for the incumbent is moderated by the levels of migration in the province. In low-migration provinces, the incumbent with good performance receives more electoral support. In contrast, the association between performance and election results becomes insignificant in low-migration provinces. The results suggest that voters are more likely to use elections as an accountability mechanism when they are less mobile. The findings are consistent with my theoretical prediction that the social contract of democracy loses relevance when citizens have private alternatives.

179 6.2 Is This an Anti-Migration Argument?

In broader perspective, the findings of this study pose a difficult normative question. By focusing on migration’s consequences for the collective well-being of the sending country, this project bears an undeniable anti-individual bias. However, I agree with Easterly and Nyarko (2008) that there is no clear moral imperative to privilege the development of nation-states over that of individuals in the migration debate. It should be made clear that at no point in my dissertation did I argue for policies for limiting the free movement of people across borders. Principled support for free migration can be a convincing philosophical argument from a human rights perspective. In utilitarian terms, there is an even stronger case for free(r) international migration. Migration clearly benefits individual migrants and their families from developing countries and does so more effectively than foreign aid or other development policy initiatives (Pritchett 2006). The impact of migration at the collective level, however, merits discussion for a simple reason: although international migration will continue because of a considerable income gap between wealthy and poor countries and falling transportation costs, there will never be free migration. In an imperfectly mobile world, the well-being of those left behind still matters. Perfectly free migration cannot be a baseline of decision making as long as modern-states and citizenship regimes still serve as a relevant reference category in our social life. This is disappointing given the cruelty of the birthright lottery of citizenship. In an ideal world, citizens should be encouraged and allowed to leave their country and settle for another based on their preferences. Just as consumers

180 try several products and choose the one that best meets their needs, citizens should be able to choose the best among existing governments. Yet it is difficult to con- ceive such free mobility for ordinary people in a foreseeable future. Immigration is politically unpopular in almost every country and even countries of large-scale emigration frequently impose heavy restrictions on those who seek to enter their land. As pointed out by Breunig, Cao and Luedtke (2009), we should be reminded that the right to emigrate is firmly included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but right to immigrate is almost a non-concept. Therefore, in the unideal world where free migration is restricted, a strong moral case can be made that we should at least consider the possibility that migration may exert a negative influence on certain aspects of political life in the country of origin. The political reality warns us not be too sanguine about the migration’s overall impact on the country migrants leave behind.

6.3 Future Research

First, the most immediate extension of my argument is to explore the effects of political brain drain on the citizen-government relationship. My dissertation does not take into account the selection effect of the migrant households in their response to new participation incentives. Yet the fact that migration is more prevalent among citizens with higher education levels is impossible to ignore. I will examine the human capital dimension of the migration-democracy linkage to see whether the absence of more educated citizens aggravates the disincentive effect. Previous accounts of brain drain have emphasized its impact on public health care (World Health Organization

181 2006) and economic growth (Michel, Docquier & Rapoport 2001), yet its political implications have been rarely understood in a systematic manner. It is possible that the hemorrhage of professional and managerial classes poses particular challenges to new and less established democracies (Anderson 1998). Human capital provides would-be migrants with better job prospects abroad and more resources that can be used for the migration process. Yet the same human capital would have made these migrants, had they stayed behind, better equipped than their poorer countrymen to challenge the status quo and demand quality governance. Preferences for a well-functioning democratic government are assumed to be similar across classes, but the middle class simply has more resources for political mobilization. Specifically, the middle class is important to electoral and non-electoral mechanisms of accountability for the following reason. Educated citizens demand and facilitate the production of more and better information about elections and governance, which has a trickle-down effect for a wider society. Equally importantly, educated citizens frequently serve as opinion leaders of the rest of the public. There- fore, brain drain may amplify the disengagement effect of migration with important implications for the quality of democracy in the sending country. The second area of interest is to explain regime durability using international migration. My dissertation argues that migration makes citizens less attentive to domestic politics, which is consistent with a long-held insight that considers migration as a “safety valve” to defuse domestic pressure. Although my argument is formally limited to the citizen-government relationship in a democracy, the logic naturally extends to dictatorship where the impact of migration on authoritarian

182 durability is a primary concern. The key consideration is the pro-status quo effect of migration that the exit option and access to external resources defuse political challenge. Once we recognize migration as a pro-status quo force, we can reconcile two seemingly conflicting predictions about the effect of openness and mobility on regime type. Although the safety valve has been discussed in the context where scholars try to explain the survival of unpopular and incompetent political arrangements, the theoretical premise is in essence the force of exit that favors the status quo, be it democracy or dictatorship. The work by Kapur (2010a) is a rare example of an argument that the safety valve can also work in favor of democracy as long as it is a status quo. He argues that emigration in India, especially the emigration of an upper class, allowed political power sharing with the previously marginalized social groups without much conflict. In the end, migration may promote both democracy and dictatorship. It may not be a coincidence that the Philippines, another thriving democracy in the developing world, has a significant number of its citizens, many of whom have upper and middle class backgrounds, abroad. Thus, migration may simply reinforce existing political institutions irrespective of their regime type. This new understanding of migration suggests that, although migration may not have the power to promote democracy in authoritarian regimes or foster dictatorship in democracies, when migration is present, both democratic and authoritarian regimes sustain themselves without reversing their paths. This extends the argument of my dissertation that external resources and opportunities weaken citizens’ vested interests in the governing process to a more general claim about the relationship between citizens and the government.

183 Finally, future research needs to investigate to what extent differing migration outcomes are determined by structural factors internal to sending countries. Much of the disagreement about the political economy implications of remittances depends on how easy it is to access migration in the first place. Existing studies advocating the empowerment effect of migration acknowledge that such a claim is based on the assumption that migrants come predominantly from poor households.1 This, however, is an empirical question to be determined by cross-national data. To be sure, the characteristics of migrants are determined by a wide range of other factors that affect migration costs, including geographic proximity to likely destinations, specific labor demand, and immigration policies of the host country, and labor export policy of the home country. Yet the initial conditions about what socioeconomic background the majority of migrants come from are particularly important when explaining political outcomes of migration (de Haas 2009).

6.4 Concluding Remarks

The most obvious implication of these findings is that the globalization is not an unmitigated blessing. The effects are mostly positive for individuals involved in migration: individual migrants and their families benefit considerably and they deserve to do so. A problem arises because the current form of globalization is an imperfect one. Although the integration of world economy makes our time unique in history,

1“To the extent that international migrants come from poor households, remittances will then beneﬁt these households, giving them autonomous sources of income and liquidity. In turn, this can undermine existing patronage networks and therefore impact on clientelistic politics” (Kapur 2019a, p.31).

184 still much more people live in the country of their birth, bearing the consequences, for better or worse, of its political arrangements. To the extent that nation-states are a relevant political concept, we should continue to pay attention to any negative eﬀect of globalization on the country as a whole. This is not to privilege state sovereignty over private citizens. Rather, it is a concern about the well-being of those individual citizens staying behind.

185 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abdih, Yasser, Ralph Chami Jihad Dagher & Peter Montiel. 2008. Remittances and Institutions: Are Remittances a Curse? Technical report IMF Working Paper. WP/08/29.

Achen, Christopher H. & Larry M. Bartels. 2004. “Blind Retrospection: Electoral Responses to Drought, Flu, and Shark Attacks.” Princeton University. Working Paper.

Adams, Richard H. Jr. & John Page. 2005. “Do International Migration and Remittances Reduce Poverty in Developing Countries.” World Development 33(10):1645–79.

Adida, Claire, L. & Desha M. Girod. 2011. “Do Migrants Improve their Home- towns? The Eﬀects of Remittances on Public Goods in Mexico, 1995-2000.” Comparative Political Studies 44(1):1–25.

Agunias, Dovelyn Rannveig & Neil G. Ruiz. 2007. “Protecting Overseas Work- ers: Lessons and Cautions from the Philippines.” Insight. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.

Ahmed, Faisal Z. 2010. “Remittances Foster Government Corruption.”.

Alegado, Dean. 1997. “The Labor Export Industry and Post-1986 Philippine Eco- nomic Development.” Pilipinas 29:19–38.

Anderson, Benedict. 1998. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. London, New York: Verso chapter Cacique Democracy in the Philippines, pp. 192–226.

Ang, Alvin P., Guntur Sugiyarto & Shikha Jha. 2009. Remittances and Household Behavior in the Philippines. Technical Report 188 ADB Economics Working Paper Series. 186 Aparicio, Javier & Covadonga Meseguer. 2009. “The Political Economy of Col- lective Remittances: The Mexican 3? Program for Migrants.” Paper prepared for delivery at the American Political Science Association Annual Conference Toronto, 3-6 September 2009 .

Arceneaux, Kevin. 2003. “The Conditional Impact of Blame Attribution on the Relationship between Economic Adversity and Turnout.” Political Research Quarterly 56(1):67–75.

Asia Development Bank. 2005. Enhancing the Eﬃciency of Overseas Workers’ Remittances. Technical assistance report.

Asis, Maruja. 2008. How International Migration Can Support Development: A Challenge for the Philippines. In Migration and Development: Perspectives from the South, ed. Stephen Castles & Raul Delgado Wise. Geneva: International Organization for Migration.

Asis, Maruja M.B. 2006. “The Philippines’ Culture of Migration.” The Migration Information Source .

Beauchemin, Cris & Bruno Schoumaker. 2009. “Are Migrant Associations Actors in Local Development? A National Event-History Analysis in Rural Burkina Faso.” World Development 37(12):1897–1913.

Beine, Michel, Frederic Docquier & Hillel Rapoport. 2008. “Brain Drain and Human Capital Formation in Developing Countries: Winners and Losers.” Economic Journal 118:631–52.

Berry, Christopher R. & William G. Howell. 2007. “Accountability and Local Elections: Rethinking Retrospective Voting.” Journal of Politics 69(3):844– 858.

Boix, Carles. 2003. Democracy and Redistribution. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press.

Borjas, Geroge J. 2001. Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Brady, Henry E., Sidney Verba & Kay Lehman Schlozman. 1995. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Harvard University Press.

187 Brees, Inge. 2009. “Burmese Refugee Transnationalism: What Is the Eﬀect?” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Aﬀairs 28(2):23–46.

Breunig, Christian, Xun Cao & Adam Luedtke. 2009. “International Migration and its Political Sources: A Network Analysis.”.

Burgess, Katrina. 2005. Migrant Philanthropy and Local Governance. In New Patterns for Mexico: Observations on Remittances, Philanthropic Giving and Equitable Development, ed. Barbara J. Merz. Harvard University Press pp. 99– 157.

Camp, Roderic Ai. 2003. “Learning Democracy in Mexico and the United States.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 19(1):3–27.

Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller & Donald E. Stokes. 1960. The American Voter. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Capuno, Joseph J. 2005. “The Quality of Local Governance and Development under Decentralization in the Philippines.” Discussion Paper No. 0506, School of Economics, University of the Philippines.

Carrington, William J, Enrica Detragiache & Tara Vishwanath. 1996. “Migration with Endogenous Moving Costs.” American Economic Review 86(4):909–930.

Chami, Ralph, Adolfo Barajas, Thomas Cosimano, Connel Fullenkamp, Michael Gapen & Peter Montiel. 2008. Macroeconomic Consequences of Remittances. Washington, D.C.: Internatinal Monetary Fund.

Chaudhry, Kiren Aziz. 1989. “The Price of Wealth: Business and State in Labor Remittance and Oil Economies.” International Organization 43(1):101–45.

Cheibub, Jose Antonio & Adam Przeworski. 1999. Democracy, Accountability, and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press chapter Democracy, Elections, and Accountability for Economic Outcomes, pp. 222–50.

Chhibber, Pradeep, Sandeep Shastri, & Richard Sisson. 2004. “Federal Arrange- ments and the Provision of Public Goods in India.” Asian Survey 44(3):339–352.

Clark, William, Matt Golder & Sona Golder. 2007. “The Balance of Power Between Citizens and the State: Democratization and the Resource Curse.”.

188 Cleary, Matthew R. 2007. “Electoral Competition, Participation, and Government Responsiveness in Mexico.” American Journal of Political Science 51(2):283– 299. Cohen, Jeﬀrey H. 2004. The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico. University of Texas Press. Conde, Carlos. 2009a. “In the Philippines, Political Dynasties Die Hard.” New York Times November 24. Conde, Carlos H. 2009b. “The Making of a Massacre in the Philippines.” New York Times December 10. de Haas, Hein. 2009. “Mobility and Human Development.” Human Development Research Paper 2009/01, UNDP Washington DC. de la Garza, Rodolfo O. & Muserref Yetim. 2003. “The Impact of Ethnicity and Socialization on Deﬁnitions of Democracy: The Case of Mexican Americans and Mexicans.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 19(1):81–104. de Luna-Martinez, Jose. 2005. “Workers’ Remittances to Developing Countries: A Survey with Central Banks on. Selected Public Policy Issues.” Policy Research Working Paper 3638. World Bank. Washington D.C. Dilip Ratha, Sanket Mohapatra & Ani Silwal. 2009. Migration and Development Brief 11: Migration and Remittance Trends 2009. Migration and Remittances Team, Development Prospects Group, World Bank. Docquier, Frederic, Ousmane Faye & Pierre Pestieau. 2008. “Is Migration a Good Substitute for Education Subsidies?” Journal of Development Economics 86:263?76. Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper. Duch, Raymond M. & Randolph Stevenson. 2006. “Assessing the Magnitude of the Economic Vote over Time and Across Nations.” Electoral Studies 25(3):528–47. Duch, Raymond M. & Randolph T. Stevenson. 2008. The Economic Vote: How Political and Economic Institutions Condition Election Results. Cambridge University Press. Dunning, Thad. 2008. Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes. Cambridge University Press. 189 Durand, Jorge, Emilio A. Parrado & Douglas S. Massey. 1996. “Migradollars and Development: A Reconsideration of the Mexican Case.” International Migra- tion Review 30(2):423–444.

Easterly, William & Yaw Nyarko. 2008. Is the Brain Drain Good for Africa? Technical report The Brookings Global Economy and Development Working Paper.

Ellis, Andrew, Carlos Navarro, Isabel Morales, Maria Gratschew & Nadja Braun, eds. 2007. Voting from Abroad: The International IDEA Handbook. Stockholm: International IDEA.

Epstein, Gil S. & Ira N. Gang. 2006. “The Inﬂuence of Others on Migration Plans.” Review of Development Economics 10:652–665.

Erikson, Robert S. 1989. “Economic Conditions and The Presidential Vote.” Amer- ican Political Science Review 83(2):567–573.

Erikson, Robert S. 1990. “Economic Conditions and the Congressional Vote: A Review of the Macrolevel Evidence.” American Journal of Political Science 34:373–399.

Esteves, Rui & David Khoudour-Casteras. 2009. “A Fantastic Rain of Gold: Euro- pean Migrants’ Remittances and Balance of Payments Adjustment During the Gold Standard Period.” The Journal of Economic History 69(4):951–985.

Evans, Geoﬀrey & Robert Andersen. 2006. “The Political Conditioning of Economic Perceptions.” The Journal of Politics 68(1):194–207.

Faini, Riccardo. 2007. “Remittances and the Brain Drain: Do More Skilled Migrants Remit More?” The World Bank Economic Review 21(2):177–91.

Fearon, James D. 1999. Democracy, Accountability, and Representation. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press chapter Electoral Accountability and the Control of Politicians: Selecting Good Types versus Sanctioning Poor Perfor- mance, pp. 131–153.

Ferejohn, John. 1986. “Incumbent Performance and Electoral Control.” Public Choice 50(2):5–26.

Fiorina, Morris. 1978. “Economic Retrospective Voting in American National Elec- tions: A Micro-Analysis.” American Journal of Political Science 22:426–443. 190 Galing Pook Foundation. various years. Galing Pook Outstanding Local Governance Programs.

Geddes, Barbara. 1994. Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Ghalioun, Burhan. 2004. “The Persistence of Arab Authoritarianism.” Journal of Democracy 15(4):126–132.

Glick-Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch & Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1995. “From Immi- grant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration.” Anthropological Quarterly 68(1):48–63.

Goodman, Gary L. & Jonathan T. Hiskey. 2008. “Exit without Leaving: Politi- cal Disengagement in High Migration Municipalities in Mexico.” Comparative Politics 40(2):169–88.

Greene, Kenneth F. 2007. Why Dominant Parties Lose Mexico’s Democratization in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Grzymala-Busse, Anna. 2007. Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies. New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press.

Hatton, Timothy J. & Jeﬀrey G. Williamson. 1994. “What Drove the Mass Migra- tions from Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century?” Population and Develop- ment Review 20(3):533–559.

Hatton, Timothy J. & Jeﬀrey G. Williamson. 2005. Global Migration and the World Economy: Two Centuries of Policy and Performance. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.

Head, Jonathan. 2007. “Dynasties Dominate Philippines Poll.” BBC News May 14.

Hicken, Allen & Joel W. Simmons. 2008. “The Personal Vote and the Eﬃcacy of Education Spending.” American Journal of Political Science 52(1):109–124.

Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Harvard University Press.

Hirschman, Albert O. 1978. “Exit, Voice and the State.” World Politics 31(1):90– 107.

191 Hirschman, Alfred O. 1986. Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays. Viking chapter Exit and Voice, pp. 77–101.

Howells, Gary. 2003. “‘On Account of their Disreputable Characters’: Parish- Assisted Emigration from Rural England, 18341860.” History 88(292):587–605.

Human Development Network. 2009. Philippine Human Development Report: In- stitutions, Politics and Human Development.

Huntington, Samuel. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hutchcroft, Paul D. 1994. Booty Capitalism: Business-Government Relations in the Philippines. In Business and Government in Industrializing Asia, ed. Andrew MacIntyre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Hutchcroft, Paul D. & Joel Rocamora. 2003. “Strong Demands and Weak Institu- tions: The Origins and Evolution of the Democratic Deﬁcit in the Philippines.” Journal of East Asian Studies 3:259–292.

Inglehart, Ronald. 2003. “How Solid Is Mass Support for Democracy: And How Can We Measure It?” PS: Political Science and Politics 36(1):51–57.

International Foundation for Electoral Systems. 2010. “Electoin Guide.” http://www.electionguide.org/.

International Monetary Fund. 2009. International Transactions in Remittances: Guide for Compilers and Users.

International Organization for Migration. 2006. Migration and Development: Op- portunities and Challenges for Policymakers.

International Organization for Migration. 2010. World Migration Report 2010 - The Future of Migration: Building Capacities for Change.

Jasso, Guillermina, Mark Rosensweig & James P. Smith. 2003. “The Earnings of U.S. Immigrants: World Skill Prices, Skill Transferability, and Selectiv- ity.” Labor and Demography Available at http://econwpa.wustl.edu:80/eps/ lab/papers/0312/0312007.pdf.

Kamphoefner, Walter D. 1987. The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri. Princeton University Press.

192 Kapur, Devesh. 2004. “Remittances: The New Development Mantra?” G-24 Discussion Paper Series No. 29 Geneva: The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Kapur, Devesh. 2010a. Diaspora, Development, and Democracy: The Domestic Impact of International Migration from India. Princeton University Press. Kapur, Devesh. 2010b. Diaspora, Development, and Democracy: The Domestic Im- pact of International Migration from India. Princeton University Press chapter Civil or Uncivil Transnational Society?, pp. 211–249. Kapur, Devesh & John McHale. 2003. “Migration’s New Payoff.” Foreign Policy 138:48–57. Kaufmann, Daniel, Aart Kraay & Massimo Mastruzzi. 2009. “Governance Matters VIII: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators, 1996-2008.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 4978. Key, V.O. 1966. The Responsible Electorate. Vintage Books, New York. Kiewiet, D. Roderick. 1983. Macroeconomics and Micropolitics: The Electoral Effects of Economic Issues. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Killian, Mitchell, Ryan Schoen, & Aaron Dusso. 2008. “Keeping Up with the Jone- ses: The Interplay of Personal and Collective Evaluations of Voter Turnout.” Political Behavior 30(September):323–340. Kinder, Donald R. & D. Roderick Kiewiet. 1981. “Sociotropic Politics: the American Case.” British Journal of Political Science 11:129–161. King, Gary, Michael Tomz & Jason Wittenberg. 2000. “Making the Most of Statis- tical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation.” American Journal of Political Science 44(2):347–61. Kitschelt, Herbert & Steven I. Wilkinson, eds. 2007. Patrons, Clients and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition. Cambridge University Press. Lamba-Nieves, Deepak & Peggy Levitt. 2011. “Social Remittances Revisited.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37(1):1–22. Levitt, Kari. 2005. Reclaiming development: independent thought and Caribbean community. Ian Randle Publishers, Kinston, Jamaica. 193 Levitt, Peggy. 1998. “Social Remittances: Migration Driven Local-Level Forms of Cultural Diffusion.” International Migration Review 32(4):926–948. Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. University of California Press. Levitt, Peggy & Nina Glick Schiller. 2004. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society.” International Migration Review 38(3):1002–1039. Lewis-Beck, Michael S. & Mary Stegmaier. 2000. “Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes.” Annual Review of Political Science 3:183–219. Lowry, Robert C., James E. Alt & Karen E. Ferree. 1998. “Fiscal Policy Outcomes and Electoral Accountability in American States.” American Political Science Review 92(4):759–774. Malhotra, Neil & Alexander G. Kuo. 2008. “Attributing Blame: The Publics Response to Hurricane Katrina.” Journal of Politics 70:120–35. Manasan, Rosario G. 2005. “Local Public Finance in the Philippines: Lessons in Autonomy and Accountability.” Philippine Journal of Development 60(2):31– 102. Massey, Douglas S., Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino & J. Edward Taylor, eds. 1998. Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium. Oxford University Press. Mayda, Anna Maria. 2010. “International Migrations: A Panel Data Analysis of the Determinants of Bilateral Flows.” Journal of Population Economics 23(4):1249– 1274. Michel, Beine, Frederic Docquier & Hillel Rapoport. 2001. “Brain Drain and Eco- nomic Growth: Theory and Evidence.” Journal of Development Economics 64:275–289. OECD. 2007. Policy Coherence for Development: Migration and Developing Coun- tries. Paris: OECD Development Center. Olarte, Avigail M. 2007. “Reforms, Relatives, and Bulacans Governor.” Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism iReport April 18. Oliver, J. Eric & Shang E. Ha. 2007. “Vote Choice in Suburban Elections.” Amer- ican Political Science Review 101(03):393–408. 194 O’Mahony, Angela. 2008. Political Investment: Remittances and Elections. In International Political Economy Society.

Onishi, Norimitsu. 2010. “Toiling Far From Home for Philippine Dreams.” New York Times September 18.

Orozco, Manuel. 2003. Hometown Associations and their Present and Future Part- nerships: New Development Opportunities? Report commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Ortega, Francesc & Giovanni Peri. 2009. “The Causes and Eﬀects of International Labor Mobility:Evidence from OECD Countries 1980-2005.” Human Develop- ment Research Paper 2009/06, UNDP Washington DC.

Pedraza, Silvia. 2007. Political Disaﬀection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus. Cambridge University Press.

Peltzman, Sam. 1990. “How Eﬃcient Is the Voting Market?” Journal of Law and Economics 33(1):27–63.

Perez-Armendariz, Clarisa & David Crow. 2010. “Do Migrants Remit Democracy? International Migration and Political Beliefs and Behavior in Mexico.” Com- parative Political Studies 43(1):119–148.

Pfutze, Tobias. 2007. Do Remittances Promote Democratization??How Interna- tional Migration Helps to Overcome Political Clientelism: PhD thesis Depart- ment of Economics. New York University.

Philippine Institute for Development Studies. 2007. Beneﬁt Incidence of Public Spending on Education in the Philippines.

Philippines Overseas Employment Administration. 2006. OFW Global Presence.

Pintor, Rafael Lopez & Maria Gratschew. 2002. Voter Turnout Since 1945: A Global Report. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

Popkin, Samuel L. 1991. The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Portes, Alejandro. 1999. The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers, Inc chapter Globalisation from Below: The Rise of Transnational Communities.

195 Portes, Alejandro. 2010. “Migration and Social Change: Some Conceptual Reﬂec- tions.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36(10):1537–1563.

Pritchett, Lant. 2006. Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility. Center for Global Development.

Rajan, Raghuram & Arvind Subramanian. 2007. “Does Aid Aﬀect Governance?” American Economic Review 97:322–327.

Rosenzweig, Mark R. 1988. “Risk, Implicit Contracts and the Family in Rural Areas of Low-Income Countries.” The Economic Journal 98(393):1148–1170.

Ross, Michael. 2001. “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” World Politics 53(3):325–361.

Rother, Stefan. 2009. “Changed in Migration? Philippine Return Migrants and (Un)Democratic Remittances.” European Journal of East Asian Studies 8(2):245– 74.

Sassen, Saskia. 1996. Losing Control?: Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization. Columbia University Press.

Scalabrini Migration Center. 2005. Hearts Apart: Migration in the Eyes of Filipino Children. Quezon City, the Philippines.

Scott, James C. 1969. “The Analysis of Corruption in Developing Nations.” Com- parative Studies in Society and History 11(3):315–341.

Senate of the Philippines. 2009a. “Villar’s OFW Helpline repatriates distressed OFWs.” Press Release February 18.

Senate of the Philippines. 2009b. “Villar’s OFW Helpline Rescues Pinays in Malaysia Prostitution Den.” Press Release March 17.

Sidel, John T. 1999. Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines. Stanford University Press.

Silver, Brian D., Barbara A. Anderson & Paul R. Abramson. 1986. “Who Overre- ports Voting?” American Political Science Review 80(2):613–624.

Simbulan, Dante C. 2005. The Modern Principalia: The Historical Evolution Of The Philippine Ruling Oligarchy. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.

196 Singer, David Andrew. 2010. “Migrant Remittances and Exchange Rate Regimes in the Developing World.” American Political Science Review 104(2):307–323.

Solon, Orville Jose C., Raul V. Fabella & Joseph J. Capuno. 2009. “Is Local Development Good Politics? Local Development Expenditures and the Re- election of Governors in the Philippines in the 1990s.” Asian Journal of Political Science 17(3):265–284.

Stark, Oded & Robert E. B. Lucas. 1988. “Migration, Remittances, and the Family.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 36(3):465–481.

Strikwerda, Carl. 1999. “Tides of Migration, Currents of History: The State, Economy, and the Transatlantic Movement of Labor in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” International Review of Social History 44:367394.

Teehankee, Julio. 2002. “Electoral politics in the Philippines.” Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia pp. 149–202.

Teves, Maria Althea. 2009. “Campaign for Overseas Voters in Full Gear.” ABS- CBN NEWS May 1.

Tiongson-Mayrina, Karen. 2010. “How Dynasties Fared in the May 2010 Elections.” GMA News Research 20 July.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1920. The Frontier in American History. New York: H. Holt.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Aﬀairs. 2006. Trends in Total Migrant Stock:The 2005 Revision. Population Division.

Verba, Sidney, Kay L. Schlozman & Henry E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Harvard University Press.

Waldinger, Roger. 2008. “Between “Here” and “There”: Immigrant Cross-Border Activities and Loyalties.” International Migration Review 42(1):3–29.

Waldinger, Roger & David Fitzgerald. 2004. “Transnationalism in Question.” Amer- ican Journal of Sociology 109(5):1177–95.

World Bank. 2006. Global Economic Prospects 2006: Economic Implications of Remittances and Migration. Washington, D.C.

World Bank. 2011. Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011. World Bank. 197 World Health Organization. 2006. The World Health Report. chapter From the Workforce, pp. 97–117.

Wright, Joseph. 2009. “Exit During Crisis: How Openness, Migration, and Eco- nomic Crisis Aﬀect Democratization.”.

Yang, Dean. 2009. International Migration and Human Development. Technical report United Nations Development Programme Human Development Research Paper 2009/29.

Yang, Dean & Claudia A. Martinez. 2005. Remittances and Poverty in Migrants’ Home Areas: Evidence from the Philippines. In International Migration, Re- mittances, and the Brain Drain, ed. Caglar Ozden & Maurice Schiﬀ. World Bank.

Yang, Dean & HwaJung Choi. 2007. “Are Remittances Insurance? Evidence from Rainfall Shocks in the Philippines.” The World Bank Economic Review 21(2):219–48.

Yin, Jasmine. 2007. “Myanmar Nationals Double-taxed by Embassy in Singapore.” Channel News Asia March 21.

Zezima, Katie. 2010. “For Haitians, Campaign Trail Runs Through U.S.” New York Times November 11.

198