Militants in exile

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation of a paper by Alejandro López Peceño (Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at EUI) co-authored with Elias Dinas (EUI) and Pau Grau (EUI)

While a large literature studies how migrants' mere presence affects natives’ attitudes, less is known about how migrants can actively reshape the politics of destination societies. We argue that politically experienced migrants can transplant organizational capacity into host communities, strengthening the local mobilisation capacity of aligned host-country parties. We examine this argument by studying the exile of half a million Spanish Republicans to France: left-wing exiles with substantial experience in party and union organising. We leverage newly digitised individual-level refugee records to show that communes hosting Spanish refugees shifted toward communist candidates in the postwar period. These results cannot be driven by compositional effects because most refugees did not get voting rights. We show that the increase in communist support reflects vote switching rather than mobilisation, suggesting that Spanish refugees helped reorient left-wing voters toward the PCF.

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