Migration, political socialization and the emigrant vote 

Abstract

Speaker: Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona How do political attitudes and behaviour change in migration? Broadly speaking, one set of arguments posits that the migration process transforms emigrants’ political views and preferences through exposure to more consolidated democratic institutions in the countries of residence. An alternative perspective argues that emigrants display similar political preferences to those in their home country because their political socialization mainly takes place prior to departure and/or their preferences remain tied in with main socio-economic, ethnic or religious cleavages in the country of origin from afar. This presentation discusses how analysis of emigrant voting in homeland elections contributes to the understanding of the relationship between migration, political socialization and political distance (here defined as the difference in democracy scores between the countries of origin and residence). Drawing on an extensive novel dataset of emigrant votes per country of residence in more than 170 homeland elections worldwide, we present findings from an ongoing analysis on the extent to which political distance is related to systematic differences between the emigrant and homeland vote.