Mass Emigration and Political Change: Evidence from Historical Swedish Elections

Abstract: Migrants do not only affect the societies in which they arrive. When people leave in large numbers, their absence will also have indirect consequences for the societies from which they left. Between 1860 and 1930, 1.4 million Swedes emigrated abroad, most of them settling in the United States. In this essay I look at how this historic migration episode, in which a quarter of the population left the country, affected the political outcomes in Sweden. I link emigration records, election data and population censuses for 2363 municipalities observed over 8 general elections between 1911 to 1928. I show that municipalities with more emigration saw larger relative gains for left-wing parties in subsequent elections. Looking at migrant selection, I find evidence that municipalities with more emigration turned relatively more collectivistic, lending some support to the hypothesis that part of the left-wing gain can be explained as a consequence of ideological selection of emigrants.