Migrant Remittances and Regime Stability: The Influence of Sending Countries

Recent research on the relationship between migrant remittances and authoritarian regime stability has reached contradictory conclusions. Remittances have been shown to reduce receivers’ dependence on clientelistic networks, thus weakening authoritarian rule. On the other hand, high levels of remittance receipts have been claimed to allow authoritarian regimes to spend less on public goods and more on patronage, thus strengthening their rule. This paper argues that the contradictory results found in recent literature can be explained by taking into account whether the migrants sending remittances have moved to democratic or authoritarian states. It proposes a third causal mechanism drawn from the literature on ‘social remittances’ which interacts with the other causal mechanisms to produce either greater or lesser stability in remittance-receiving authoritarian states. Evidence is provided from time-series cross-sectional data using estimates of bilateral remittances based on migrant stocks and differences in GDP between sending and receiving countries.