The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in international migration and attendant remittance flows across borders. Recent scholarship suggests that remittance wealth and mobility opportunities made available by migration may empower citizens and lead to social transformations in the country of origin. This increasingly popular view holds that the political autonomy created by remittances and democratic attitudes transmitted through diaspora networks changes political relationships in developing countries in favor of ordinary citizens. However, whether international mobility indeed promotes democracy is subject to dispute in both theoretical and empirical terms.
This dissertation explores how international migration affects citizens' demand for government accountability in origin countries. The availability of exit and migration-generated remittance inflows creates a possibility of life chances relatively independent of the home country and thus insulates citizens from the consequences of domestic politics. I argue that the resulting decline in a "stake" in society reduces the perceived benefits of political engagement, and this leads to fewer incentives on the part of citizens to hold the government accountable and to ensure effective representation.
Using individual-level and subnational aggregate data from the Philippines, I demonstrate that migration changes how citizens relate to and seek to control the government. I first show that existing studies arguing that migration promotes citizens' political engagement may be misleading theoretically and fail to hold up empirically in the Philippines. I then test my theoretical argument with individual-level survey data and show that households with family members abroad are less likely to rely on government services and more likely to feel insulated from the vagaries of the domestic economy. Finally, using province-level data on local elections, I show that electoral accountability--the extent to which citizens sanction the government based on its performance--suffers in a high-migration environment. I analyze gubernatorial election results and find that the extent to which voters reward or punish the incumbent governor on the basis of his or her performance varies depending on the prevalence of migration in that province. By operationalizing electoral accountability as incumbent governor's vote share accounted for by the performance in office, I find that good performance by the incumbent is rewarded electorally when migration is low, but that the linkage between performance and an incumbent's vote share becomes uncertain when migration increases. In sum, this project demonstrates that international migration may have unintended consequences for the quality of democracy in the country of origin by making citizens less willing to enforce the principle of representation to the government.