Making Democratic Citizens: The Effects of Migration Experience on Political Attitudes in Central and Eastern Europe

This article examines the effects of migration experience on political attitudes in Central and Eastern European countries. The rationale for this quest is the hypothesis that contact with democratic contexts translates into democratic political attitudes, for which evidence is so far inconclusive. In this article, we are interested to see whether migrants returning from Western countries display different political attitudes than their fellow non-migrant citizens. Our analysis of survey data shows that migration experience diversifies the array of political attitudes: while migrants are more likely to trust EU institutions and to try to convince friends in political discussions, they do not differ from non-migrants in their attitudes towards domestic institutions. Based on earlier works on determinants of political attitudes, we argue that migration experience has a significant effect only when these attitudes are related to objects that are associated with improvements in the migrants’ material and cognitive status.