International Migration and its Political Sources: A Network Analysis.” Unpublished paper

Abstract: The quantitative study of human migration lags far behind its political significance in recent years. We now have sophisticated models for explaining transnational flows of goods, services, and capital. But despite ever-growing numbers of humans crossing national borders, political science analysis of these migration flows has suffered from the following shortcomings: (1) a narrow focus on migration from emerging economies to the developed world, which captures only a small share of world migration; (2) a focus on unilateral migration flows (receiving countries), without analyzing bilateral relationships. We propose to remedy these shortcomings by performing network analysis of bilateral migration covering all regions of the world. We explicitly model bi-lateral migration using a generalized-bilinear-mixed-effects model. Making the analysis even more relevant for political science, we propose that the political dynamics of a country’s regime type determine human migration. based on a micro- and a macro-level logic, we argue that democratic regimes attract less migrants than non-democratic regimes and that democracies send more immigrants to authoritarian states. In addition to this political hypothesis, the analysis also controls for several basic alternative explanations prevalent in immigration literature, including the effects of economic factors, civil conflict and natural disasters in the sending and the receiving country, geographical distance, and historical factors (such as colonial ties and common languages). Our analysis seeks to advance the study of human migration into new terrain by developing a political theory of global migration flows, by employing a sta-tistical method that captures the higher-order dependencies of network flows, and by introducing a more comprehensive data set. Migration and its Sources November 7, 200