Voting with your feet: Political competition and internal migration in the United States

Wai Man Liu*, Phong Ngo

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    6 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Do people “vote with their feet” in response to a lack of political competition? Since political competition is associated with higher growth and welfare, with the free movement of labour, we argue that it should also encourage inward migration. We test this hypothesis by using data from the US and find a strong positive relation between political competition and net migration. This result is robust to alternative specifications, alternative samples and addressing endogeneity using the Voting Rights Act to instrument for political competition. The effect is economically large, specifically, we find that an increase in political competition in the order of magnitude observed in US Southern states during the post-war period leads to an increase in net migration by between 27 and 44 individuals per 1000 population.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number101931
    JournalEuropean Journal of Political Economy
    Volume65
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Dec 2020

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