The Electoral Impact of a Large Return Migration Shock in a Nascent Democracy (with Miguel Fonseca and Susana Peralta)

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.