Laurence Go

Emigration reshapes political landscapes, yet studies question to what extent and under what circumstances emigrants support democracy in their countries of origin. Research suggests that migrants, especially those moving to more democratic countries, already have or tend to adopt stronger pro-democratic attitudes. However, evidence on how this impacts voting behavior in homeland elections is inconclusive. We assemble a comprehensive dataset that captures emigrant votes by country of residence across 180 homeland elections worldwide. Using panel regressions with various fixed effects specifications, we show that migrants’ residence in more democratic countries is associated with more support for pro-democracy parties in homeland elections, though this pattern reverses in scenarios of larger ‘democracy gaps’. Leveraging a staggered difference-in-differences design, we further demonstrate that the parliamentary presence of anti-immigrant parties in countries of residence increases emigrant support for pro-democracy parties at home. These findings advance debates on migration and transnational democratic engagement.

Patriotism, an individual sense of pride to belong to a country, is often considered by states as an important factor to secure citizen support. Yet this feeling may go beyond mere national allegiance, as it can significantly shape perceptions of out-group members. While past research has explored the interconnectedness of state-sponsored patriotism, national identification, and attitudes toward immigrants, robust empirical evidence on how these factors relate remains scarce. This paper explores the mechanism through which states foster patriotism and how this, in turn, influences attitudes toward immigrants, focusing on state-sponsored patriotism through national day celebrations given their global prevalence. We assemble a global dataset of publicly available surveys consisting of 2.7 million observations from 1985-2023. Employing an event-study design, we measure exposure to the national day as the temporal difference between survey dates and these celebrations. Leading up to the national day, citizens exhibit a lower sense of patriotism and continue to do so a few days after, returning to pre-national-day levels within two weeks. This negative result is primarily driven by countries with higher ethnic fractionalisation. We argue that in highly diverse countries, individuals are more likely to resist a unifying state narrative, becoming more open to inclusive or pluralistic conceptions of belonging, reflected in more positive attitudes toward immigrants.

As economic nationalism gains ground globally, its consequences remain unclear. We study a 1975 Philippine naturalization law that opened protected industries to foreign investors, showing how economic nationalism shapes industry growth, economic development, and market outcomes.

Discretionary targeting of social transfers creates scope for political capture, yet the institutional conditions that constrain it remain poorly understood. Combining administrative data on beneficiaries with a novel survey of local data systems, I exploit close village elections in the Philippines in a regression discontinuity design to study whether elected officials direct emergency cash transfers toward their relatives, and whether local data infrastructure constrains this favoritism. Narrowly winning a 2018 election increases the number of a candidate’s relatives receiving emergency subsidies by 0.15 to 0.28—an effect of 3 to 5 percent, concentrated entirely along the intensive margin. No such effect appears under the centralized, rule-based conditional cash transfer, establishing that favoritism is a product of discretionary program design rather than the electoral environment. Crucially, the favoritism effect is progressively attenuated by stronger municipal administrative data infrastructure, consistent with the view that institutionalized data infrastructure conditions the space within which political incentives translate into distributive advantage for family networks.

Since 1980, the share of states allowing their citizens abroad to vote has risen from roughly 13% to 72%, enfranchising an estimated 200 million emigrants across more than 140 countries—yet the consequences of this twenty-first-century franchise extension remain almost entirely unstudied. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design spanning 1950-2020, we estimate the effects of extending the vote to emigrants on migrant-targeted government spending, electoral competition, diaspora political attention, and democratic attitudes and quality. We distinguish de jure from de facto enfranchisement, address the strategic timing of reforms, and probe mechanisms by interacting enfranchisement with the share of the diaspora living in democracies.