 The return of the prodigy son: Do return migrants make better leaders?Post-Print from HAL Abstract: This paper describes the relationship between political leaders' migration experience and the evolution of democracy during their leadership. We build up an original database on the personal background of 932 politicians who were at the head of the executive power in a developing country over the 1960–2004 period. These data reveal the existence of a positive correlation between the fact that leaders studied abroad and the change in the score of democracy in their country during their tenure, for leaders who reach power in initially autocratic settings. This correlation notably appears to be driven by leaders who studied in high-income OECD countries. The main finding, confirmed by various robustness tests, adds up to the recent literature on the effects of the characteristics of political leaders. It also suggests a new channel through which migration may shape development and politics in the sending countries — namely, the political elites. Keywords: Political leaders; Migration; Democracy; Developing countries (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Journal of Development Economics, 2016, 122, pp.76-91. ⟨10.1016/j.jdeveco.2016.04.005⟩ There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01511035 DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2016.04.005 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
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