The International Transmission of Democratic Values: Evidence from the African Diaspora

This paper investigates the effect of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in European democratic host countries on support for democracy in African migrants’ origin communities. We propose a novel methodology to estimate migration stocks from sub-national areas of origin to any possible country in the world based on Google searches for origin communities performed in destination countries. We use these data alongside measures of anti-immigrant sentiment at destination to study origin communities exposure to anti-immigrant sentiment. We show that a one standard deviation increase in exposure to anti-immigrant sentiment at destination leads to a decline of between 0.1-0.2 of a standard deviation in support for democracy at origin. We conclude that rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Western democracies has the potential to harm democratic progress in Africa.