Voice after Exit? Remittances and Migration Across Authoritarian Regimes

This paper investigates the effect of exit options for the poor on regime stability and distributive spending. Since Hirschman (1970), scholars have long recognized the significance of exit options in explaining regime survival and transition. Much of this work, however, focuses almost exclusively on capital elites and asset mobility. Unfortunately, this focus is quite limiting. Divestment and capital flight are unavailable to most citizens in non-democratic societies, leaving open the question of effective and credible exit options for the poor. I address this question by exploring two potential exit options: remittances and poor migration. I argue that these exit options have distinct effects for migrant-sending and migrant-receiving states, conditional on the costs of mobility and revenue dependence across regimes. This paper also speaks to a growing literature in political economy that investigates the conditional effects of revenue on regime stability. While recent work has focused on foreign aid and other forms of nontax revenue, few studies directly consider the role of remittances.1