"Winner of the Best Book Award, Migration and Citizenship Section of the American Political Science Association" Abel Escribà-Folch is associate professor of political science at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Covadonga Meseguer is associate professor of international political economy at the ICADE Business School. She is the author of Learning, Policy Making and Market Reforms. Joseph Wright is professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University. Escribà-Folch and Wright are the coauthors of Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocratic Survival.
How remittances-money sent by workers back to their home countries-support democratic expansion
In the growing body of work on democracy, little attention has been paid to its links with migration. Migration and Democracy focuses on the effects of worker remittances-money sent by migrants back to their home countries-and how these resources shape political action in the Global South. Remittances are not only the largest source of foreign income in most autocratic countries, but also, in contrast to foreign aid or international investment, flow directly to citizens. As a result, they provide resources that make political opposition possible, and they decrease government dependency, undermining the patronage strategies underpinning authoritarianism.
The authors discuss how international migration produces a decentralized flow of income that generally circumvents governments to reach citizens who act as democratizing agents. Documenting why dictatorships fall and how this process has changed in the last three decades, the authors show that remittances increase the likelihood of protest and reduce electoral support for authoritarian incumbents.
Combining global macroanalysis with microdata and case studies of Senegal and Cambodia, Migration and Democracy demonstrates how remittances-and the movement of people from authoritarian nations to higher-income countries-foster democracy and its expansion. "Wonderful and compelling, Migration and Democracy explores how remittances influence political behavior in autocracies. In this well-written book, the empirical analyses are well executed, and there clearly has been a lot of work put in by the authors to collect, analyze, and interpret a wide range of macro- and microdata. A pleasure to read."-Jonathan Hiskey, Vanderbilt University
"Timely and inspiring, this book examines the importance of remittances in the political processes of autocratic regimes. Based on a wealth of elegantly framed analysis, Migration and Democracy convincingly demonstrates why migration should be more front and center in our understanding of democratization."-Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, Autonomous University of Barcelona "This truly innovative and pathbreaking book provides detailed explication of an enormously important-but almost entirely ignored-mechanism of international influence on regime outcomes. A model of scholarship, Migration and Democracy does a wonderful job of marshaling the available evidence to make nuanced arguments."-Lucan Way, University of Toronto
