Hybrid and Authoritarian Imprints on Migrant Voting

To examine individual-level voting turnout, we assess international migrants’ experiences during political socialization and resocialization under a variety of democratic, hybrid, and authoritarian regimes. We build on Bilodeau’s (2014) concept of ‘authoritarian imprints’, or the mark that authoritarian regimes have left on migrants, which affects their political outlooks. Adding duality, we ask migrants about both retrospective and prospective electoral behavior in two countries: as immigrants in the resident country and as emigrants for origin countries (if and when elections are held). Our data comes from an online survey (N=680) promoted via Facebook ads to Latin American immigrants in Ecuador, where they gain extensive suffrage rights after five-year residency. Calculating an aggregate logarithm of the quality of democracy during political (re)socialization processes per dataset observation, we run a set of regression models to test the (non)democratic experiences on electoral behavior patterns, using interest in politics, institutional trust, and partisanship as controls. Findings show that imprints endure but are not determinative of when or where migrants vote. To further unpack the hybrid and authoritarian imprints, we also interviewed 71 migrants who underwent political socialization in Cuba, Chile, Colombia, Peru, or Venezuela before relocating to Ecuador. Content analysis reveals that, a) the mark can instigate political interest and spur democratic political engagement in both the origin and residence countries; and b) younger migrants can ‘inherit’ the imprint from parents or family currently living in nondemocracy—indicating that imprints can also form through second-hand experience.