2025 Theses Doctoral

Essays on Migration and Political Behavior

Riaz, Zara

This dissertation studies perceptions of migrants' political behavior and the political attitudes of those who mobilize on their behalf.

In the first part, I focus on temporary internal mobility originating from rural contexts in the Global South. I ask how those who engage in this form of migration, which is often adopted as an income diversification strategy to buffer against agricultural volatility, are perceived with respect to their origin-area social and political status and commitment to village-level development.

Paper 1 provides a portrait of temporary migration across 145 Senegalese villages. Using original data on approximately 9,300 households' migration behavior and social networks, it shows that temporary migration is common in this context and documents greater social connectivity among migrant households.

Paper 2 examines perceptions of temporary migrants' contributions to local development. It employs a conjoint experiment with approximately 4,400 men from the same sample of Senegalese villages to show that migrants are perceived to contribute to local infrastructure maintenance at higher rates than non-migrants and that heterogeneity in migrants' incomes affects these perceptions.

Finally, Paper 3 shifts contexts to study immigration-related mobilization in Western Europe. Through various approaches, the paper challenges existing views that pro-immigrant individuals do not attach importance to these preferences. It draws attention to when immigration becomes salient to pro-immigrant individuals and how salience manifests in electoral and non-electoral political behavior and attitudes.