Protest vs. Migration Intention: Push Factors of Exit & Voice

• In Event: Protest in Democracies and Autocracies: Crisis, Conflict, & Repression

Abstract

When a political or economic crises hits, people have the choice to stay and fight (vote or protest against the regime) or flee (migrate abroad). Political and economic crises are often seen as major push factors driving both protest and migration. Migrants and protesters are expected to be drawn from similar demographic groups. Both, tend to be younger and reside in large urban centres (Habermas 1971; King and Raghuram 2013; Raymer and Rogers 2007). They also tend to be more educated, have more human capital and be imbedded in key social networks (Stolle and Hooghe 2011; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). And yet, the literature still finds that crises and dissatisfaction often produces two different responses, with few answers as to why that is the case. In a time of relative calm, this puzzle is only further exacerbated. Thus, we ask what drives protest and migration intention, without the push factor of an acute crisis? What drives intention to ‘exit’ or to ‘voice’ when a country is relatively stable? Are some people generally more dissatisfied than others and thus, are equally likely to intend to protest and migrate? Or does dissatisfaction with specific types of push factors like economy, democracy and/or political institutions/elite drive intention to protest more than it does to migrate and vice versa. Using original survey data from Ukraine, Poland, Argentina and Morocco (MOBILISE project 2019/2020), this paper examines, the above puzzle by testing whether different levels of satisfaction with and evaluation of a) the government, b) state of democracy, and c) the economy, drive protest or migration intention equally or whether these intentions are mediated by socio-demographic factors, and dissatisfaction with the government and democracy is more likely to drive intention to protest and dissatisfaction with the economy intention to migrate. This paper hypothesizes the former and expects that would be migrants are more likely to be more sensitive to economic push factors and would be protesters to ‘political’ push factors.

Authors

• Olga Onuch, University of Manchester

• David Doyle, University of Oxford

• Gwendolyn Sasse, Humboldt University Berlin

• Sorana Toma, ENSAE - CREST