Does Emigration Promote Democracy in Developing Countries

This paper offers a critical overview of the recent literature on migration and institutions in the context of developing countries. There are many channels through which international migration affects institutional outcomes and democracy in sending countries. Its effect can be positive or negative depending on who migrates, to where, and on how migration affects education and occupational choices. For convenience I divide here these various channels into traditional political economy approaches (rent seeking/avoiding models, models of competition across jurisdictions, Laffer effects due to education, occupation and location choices) inducing policy responses on the supply side and channels pertaining to democracy diffusion involving adjustments of preferences on the demand side. The political economy literature is very rich theoretically and rather poor empirically. The opposite is true for the democracy diffusion literature which is essentially agnostic at a theory level but rich of a growing number of careful case-studies. Finally, cross-country comparisons show an overall positive effect of emigration on the institutional development of source countries; however, the channels through which such an effect operates are not identified.