A Comparative Study of Migrant Communities

This award will fund a research project that studies the dynamics between migration and democracy. It explores the challenges and opportunities posed to governance, political inclusion, and cooperation. Areas of investigation include the role of émigrés in fostering resistance and the development of civil society networks. The major questions being investigated are how political migrants interact with the political landscapes of their host countries and their homeland; how these exiles contribute to political dynamics in their homeland through political remittances; and how the narrative of political emigration is leveraged to shape perceptions in both sending and receiving countries. This research spans democratization studies, international relations, migration studies, and media studies. This award will fund a research project that employs a mixed-methods approach using a combination of online surveys, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and automated text analysis of media to collect and analyze data to study the effects of political emigration to countries on politics of the countries these emigres left behind. Survey data will be collected on at least 4,000 observations of political migrants. The two rounds of online surveys will explore their lived situations and political behavior. This approach will track shifts in their attitudes toward political engagement, political activism, dynamics of their relationships with host countries’ communities and governments, and influence on political discourse in their home country. The qualitative methods involve conducting 100 in-depth interviews with emigrants. Additionally, interviews with returnees will take place and focus groups will examine media consumption and will be held with political migrants to assess the effectiveness of narratives in international media. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.