Historical Legacies and the Impact of Emigration on Electoral Outcomes

Abstract

This paper contributes to the emerging literature on the political impacts of emigration in sending countries. We study the outcomes of a unique electoral competition in which international migration played a prominent role. We exploit the regional variation in migration patterns and political preferences using Romanian census data and results from the two rounds of the 2014 presidential elections. Two different political shocks in the build-up and during these elections help us to identify the impact of emigration on the political behaviour of those left behind. We develop a novel set of instruments drawing on historical migration data to deal with potential confounders affecting both migration and political choices. These allow us to estimate the migration, turnout and vote-share equations simultaneously. Our results suggest that the stock of emigrants substantially affect the voting preferences in their home constituency. This effect is robust to various specifications and depends on ecological constraints and historical legacies in the regions of origin. Our paper is the first to attempt an evaluation of counterfactual outcomes under various scenarios to see if the effect on stayers offsets the direct effect of selective emigration on the electoral mass in the sending community.