A democratic dividend from emigration?

Abstract

The recent political economy literature suggests that migrants can affect the institutional evolution of their home countries through political remittances, that is, the transfer of political norms and attitudes (e.g., for democracy, corruption) via social networks from host to home countries. The main result from both cross-country comparisons and from country case-studies is that there is a democratic dividend from emigration, something that destination countries may want to (and occasionally do) take into account when setting their immigration policies.