Deepening democratization in Brazil has coincided with sustained flows of domestic migration, which raises an important question of whether migration deepens or depresses democratic development in migrant-sending regions. Alexandre Gori Maia (UNICAMP) and Yao Lu (Columbia University) analyzed the impacts of internal migration on Brazil's municipal elections. The authors show that migration increases electoral participation and competition in migrant-sending localities. The paper (click here for full access) has been published in the journal Demography.

Despite somewhat of a recent decline, the volume of internal migrants in Brazil has remained significant: nearly two million people migrate per year. Migration is dominated by rural-urban migration and northeast-southeast flow (from the poorest to the richest regions). Migration can influence democratic processes in sending communities through three main channels. The first is political remittances: migrants learn the political values and behavior of their host localities and transmit them back to their communities of origin. The second mechanism is economic remittances, which may undermine local clientelistic relations by strengthening the power of ordinary citizens relative to political actors. The third channel is through the absence of migrants, which is likely to have an adverse effect on democratic outcomes.

The authors matched data on municipal-level migration flows and socioeconomic characteristics from the demographic censuses with data from the mayoral elections between 1996 and 2012. The empirical analysis uses spatial panel data models with fixed effect estimators. Fixed effects account for potential endogeneity bias due to time-invariant omitted variables (historical institutions, for example). In turn, spatial models account that one municipality's political environment may also be correlated with that of the neighboring municipalities. The authors also used spatial network models to identify the presence of political remittances: how electoral results in the destinations are correlated with those in sending localities. 

The results highlight that out-migration, ceteris paribus, increases electoral participation and competition for those left behind in sending areas. The positive effect of migration on electoral outcomes is especially salient in rural-urban migration, which is consistent with the speculation that economic and political remittances from migrants are larger when there are greater differences between the origin and destination localities. Migration also has a more pronounced impact on electoral outcomes in localities at low levels of democratic development, where elections are undermined by clientelism and low participation. The results also highlight a strong association between electoral outcomes in origin and receiving localities, suggesting the transmission of political remittances.

This study was one of the first to examine the political consequences of migration in Brazil. The findings have some implications for understanding electoral politics in other developing democracies, where political actors have often relied on clientelism to build and maintain their power bases. This is particularly true in poor areas where a large share of voters depends heavily on social transfers from the government. In this context, migration can help undermine the hegemony of political players and reshape local power relationships by instituting more democratic political ideas and behaviors that are prevalent in more developed areas, thus allowing people who stay behind to defy clientelistic arrangements.