The Electoral Impact of a Large Return Migration Shock in a Nascent Democracy (with Miguel Fonseca and Susana Peralta)
Abstract
We study the causal impact of a large and unexpected return migration episode on political outcomes during a democratic transition that was characterized by severe political and economic instability. We analyse how the forced displacement of close to half a million settlers from Portuguese speaking African countries, motivated by the eruption of civil wars in these territories, influenced election outcomes after the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal. We apply a difference-in-differences with a continuous treatment assignment based on the share of repatriates per municipality. To deal with potential endogeneity issues, we instrument this with two shift-share variables that rely on very detailed census data covering the universe of repatriates and including information on their regions of birth. We find that repatriates significantly increased voting for right-wing parties in the ten years after the Revolution.
About this workshop
The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.
The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.
Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.