NOVAFRICA Podcast: The International Transmission of Democratic Values: Evidence from the African Diaspora

Episode 2 of the 6th Season of the NOVAFRICA Sustainable Development was recorded with Marco Manacorda, from Queen Mary University, London.

Our guest talked about his paper entitled “The International Transmission of Democratic Values: Evidence from the African Diaspora”.

Abstract
This paper investigates the effect of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in European democratic host countries on support for democracy in African migrants’ origin communities. We propose a novel methodology to estimate migration stocks from sub-national areas of origin to any possible country in the world based on Google searches for origin communities performed in destination countries. We use these data alongside measures of anti-immigrant sentiment at destination to study origin communities’ exposure to anti-immigrant sentiment. We show that a one standard deviation increase in exposure to anti-immigrant sentiment at destination leads to a decline of between 0.1-0.2 of a standard deviation in support for democracy at origin. We conclude that rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Western democracies has the potential to harm democratic progress in Africa.