Reversing Brain Drain from Autocracies

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation of a study by Emil Kamalov (EUI Researcher), co-authored with Ivetta Sergeeva (Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University).

Autocratic regimes often rely on emigration as a safety valve to ease domestic dissent, but this strategy comes at the cost of brain drain. Can such regimes entice politically motivated emigrants to return through selective incentives or improved economic opportunities, or is comprehensive regime change the only pathway to reversing this brain drain? In this study, we propose a three-dimensional model that incorporates host country conditions, home country conditions, and third country conditions into migrants’ decision-making processes regarding return. We argue that return is unlikely without the restoration of non-negotiable conditions in the home country, reflecting the original reasons behind migration. However, even such restoration is unlikely to attract the majority of those who already find these conditions in their host countries or have the opportunity to re-emigrate to another country that offers them.

To test our theory, we draw on data from a large-scale conjoint experiment with around 7,000 war-induced Russian emigrants residing in approximately 100 countries, supplemented by open-ended feedback and a longitudinal survey of Russian migrants from 2022 to 2024. As predicted by our model, politically motivated migrants are unlikely to return unless their non-negotiable condition of democratisation is at least partially met, leaving autocratic governments with only a narrow capacity to attract skilled emigrants back. In such cases, the opportunity to reverse brain drain may benefit the opposition in the event of regime change rather than the autocratic regime. However, even then, it remains difficult to encourage return among those who have opportunities elsewhere and whose democratic living conditions are already fulfilled in their host countries.

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