Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of emigration on the political choice
of the size of the welfare state. Mobility has two countervailing effects:
the political participation effect and the tax base effect. With emigration,
the composition of the constituency changes. This increases the political
influence of the less mobile part of the population. But the new political
majority then also has to take into account that emigration reduces tax
revenues and thereby affects the feasible set of redistribution policies. We
find that the direction of the total effect of migration depends on the
initial income distribution in the economy. Our results also contribute to
the empirical debate on the validity of the median-voter approach in
cross-country studies for explaining the relation between income inequality
and redistribution levels.
JEL-Classification:
F22, H50, D31, D72
Keywords: migration, redistribution, voting