Funding Autocracies? Migration and Remittances in the Survival of Non-democratic Regimes

Dr. Chipo Dendere, Consortium for Diversity Fellow & Visiting Assistant Professor, Political Science, Amherst College

Chipo Dendere is a Zimbabwean-born political scientist. Dr. Dendere is as Consortium for Diversity Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College in the Political Science Department. Her research focuses on African politics, particularly party migration, politics and democratization, public opinion, political behavior, and social media. She is working on a book manuscript on the impact of voter exit on the survival of authoritarian regimes. She collected much of the immigrant data for this project in four countries United Kingdom, United States, South Africa and Zimbabwe where she conducted 100 interviews with the Zimbabwean diaspora. Dr. Dendere has written opinion and analysis pieces for the Monkey Cage Blog and African is A Country and has given media interviews on Zimbabwean politics. She received her Ph.D. from Georgia State University where she worked with Daniel Young and Carrie Manning. She attended Waddilove Mission in Marondera, Zimbabwe. She lives in Amherst, MA, with her husband.

Remittances – the money that migrants living abroad send to their family members in the home country – continue to play an important role in keeping families out of poverty in developing countries. The questions driving this research are- what role if any do remittances play in the democratization process? Can remittances lead to democratization or are remittances like foreign aid and natural resources bad for the democratization process? The goal of this paper is to provide an explanation that is embedded in the political and economic conditions of countries were the majority of people are emigrating from and subsequently sending large amounts of money to. Using case study analyses of Zimbabwean migrant senders in the United Kingdom I find that remittances in poor authoritarian countries sustain authoritarianism.