A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Batista, Cátia; Vicente, Pedro C. Working Paper Do migrants improve governance at home? Evidence from a voting experiment IZA Discussion Papers, No. 4688 Provided in Cooperation with: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics Suggested Citation: Batista, Cátia; Vicente, Pedro C. (2010) : Do migrants improve governance at home? Evidence from a voting experiment, IZA Discussion Papers, No. 4688, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/36182 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Vicente January 2010 DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit Institute for the Study of Labor Do Migrants Improve Governance at Home? Evidence from a Voting Experiment Catia Batista Trinity College Dublin and IZA Pedro C. Vicente Trinity College Dublin, CSAE - University of Oxford, and BREAD Discussion Paper No. 4688 January 2010 IZA P.O. Box 7240 53072 Bonn Germany Phone: +49-228-3894-0 Fax: +49-228-3894-180 E-mail: [email protected] Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. IZA Discussion Paper No. 4688 January 2010 ABSTRACT Do Migrants Improve Governance at Home? Evidence from a Voting Experiment* This paper tests the hypothesis that international migration experiences may promote better institutions at home by raising the demand for political accountability. In order to examine this question, we use a simple postcard voting experiment designed to capture the population’s desire for better governance. Using data from a tailored household survey, we examine the determinants of voting behavior in our experiment, and isolate the positive effect of international emigration on the demand for political accountability. We find that this effect can be mainly attributed to the presence of return migrants, particularly to those who emigrated to countries with better governance. JEL Classification: F22, O12, O15, O43, P16 Keywords: international migration, governance, political accountability, institutions, effects of emigration in origin countries, household survey, Cape Verde, Sub-Saharan Africa Corresponding author: Catia Batista Department of Economics Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2 Ireland E-mail: [email protected] * We gratefully acknowledge useful comments from Alan Barrett, Michel Beine, Ron Davies, Claudia Martinez, Franco Mariuzzo, John McHale, Gaia Narciso, Kevin O’Rourke, Pia Orrenius, Hillel Rapoport, Frances Ruane, Maurice Schiff, Antonio Spilimbergo, Dean Yang, and participants in a number of seminars and conferences. We are indebted to Paul Collier for providing initial encouragement for this research project. We thank the dedicated team of local enumerators with whom we worked, and Deolinda Reis and Francisco Rodrigues at the National Statistics Office of Cape Verde. Research assistance was provided by Mauro Caselli. Batista gratefully acknowledges financial support from the George Webb Medley Fund at the University of Oxford. Vicente gratefully acknowledges financial support from the ESRC-funded Global Poverty Research Programme (GPRG) for the tailored household survey conducted in Cape Verde on which this paper is based. 1. Introduction Recent research has examined the important role international migration may have for the development of origin countries. The positive effects for economic growth of international remittances, return migrants, diaspora effects promoting foreign investment and international trade, and even of emigration of the most educated have by now been rather well documented. 1 An important area that has not deserved the same share of attention is the role of international migration in the improvement of institutions, which can be crucial to economic development, as surveyed by Acemoglu et al. (2005). The traditional perspective regards emigration as a “safety valve” or “outside option” that allows individuals unhappy with political institutions to leave their home country. 2 Emigration could therefore be detrimental to the quality of the domestic political system (a form of “brain drain”) by undermining the demand for political accountability, and also by hurting the capacity to supply better quality home institutions if those who leave are also those most capable of providing these services. One can however argue that emigration may promote improved political institutions in several ways: current emigrants may create strong diaspora effects whereby they influence political change (via supply, i.e. by influencing local authorities, or via demand, for instance through intensified contact of the domestic population with better institutions abroad); if return emigrants benefited from an enriching experience abroad, these effects can also translate into improvements in the quality of the domestic political institutions (via supply, by direct participation in the political system, or via demand, by bringing increased awareness and demand for political accountability). Theoretically, therefore, emigration might impact political institutions differently depending on the specific context in which it happens. This empirical question is very much unanswered in the current literature. In this paper we will test the hypothesis that 1 Evidence of the positive effects of remittances is provided, among others, by Edwards and Ureta (2003) for El Salvador, and Yang (2008) for the Philippines. Dustmann and Kirchkamp (2003) and Mesnard and Ravallion (2006) examine the role of return migration. Rauch and Trindade (2002), Kugler and Rapoport (2007) and Javorcik et al. (2007) evaluate the relationship between migrant networks, trade and FDI. The possibility of a ‘brain gain’ as opposed to traditional ‘brain drain’ claims is empirically supported by Beine et al. (2008) and Batista et al. (2009). 2 Hirschman (1970) proposed the “exit” vs. “voice” dichotomy, according to which citizens unhappy with the domestic situation either choose to emigrate (exit) or to protest and contribute to political change (voice). In this setting that emigration may be understood as a “safety valve”, which releases protest intensity in the home political system and therefore reduces demand for political improvements. international migration experiences promote better institutions at home by raising the demand for political accountability. We propose to examine this research question using a simple postcard voting experiment designed to capture the population’s demand for political accountability. Following a survey of perceived corruption in public services, respondents were asked to mail a pre- stamped postcard if they wanted the (anonymous) results of this survey to be made publicly available in the media. This was to happen if at least 50% of the survey respondents would mail the postcard back. Using tailored data from a purposely designed and conducted household survey in Cape Verde, we are able to examine the determinants of voting behavior in our experiment, and to isolate the positive effect of international emigration on the demand for political accountability. For this purpose, we consider a simple political economy framework, taking voting behavior as the outcome of an expected cost-benefit analysis. In this setting,