Drivers of Political Participation: Are Prospective Migrants Different?

We investigate the drivers of political participation in six East European transition economies, with high level of out-migration. We test for the existence of distinctive patterns of behaviours between prospective migrants and stayers. Our objective is to identify whether prospective migrants differ systematically from the rest of the population, before they migrate, in terms of their engagement with specific modes of political participation, namely voting and protesting. We find that individuals planning to migrate are nearly always more politically active than those planning to stay, when it comes to taking part in different forms of protest, but they are less likely to vote. We also find that differences are less marked in countries with higher levels of political repression. Interestingly, prospective migrants also tend to be more embedded in social networks (as captured through group membership), but they do not mobilise these links any differently than stayers when it comes to political participation