The authors wish to express their gratitude to the Stiftung für Bevölkerung, Migration und Umwelt (BMU) for their generous funding of this project and for their openness to the ideas underlying this new area of research. We also want to thank the many people that have contributed to the study, the findings of which are presented in this book. The cooperation between Social Weather...

ABI

The topic of this book is highly innovative. So far, migration research largely focused on the motivation for migration, which economists depicted as rational choice of individuals and households, and on the effects of migration in the countries of destination. Frequently studied themes were how migrants were integrated into the host societies, the migration regime and its legal provisions, the...

Can labor migration affect democratization processes and which impact has the political order of the host countries on this potential effect? This was the starting point for our research, which connects migration studies with research on democratization. It also links two research themes that have previously been mostly neglected by each of these two research areas. In migration research, studies...

The theoretical background of this book draws from a number of disciplines; we are taking migration and democratization research as a starting point and basing our approach on more recent concepts such as migration and (human) development, migrant transnationalism, and the diffusion of ideas through migration. In democratization research, we combine...

The study design is based on a mixed methods approach ~(Huotari, Rüland, and Schlehe 2014; Lübke 2014) and combines quantitative with qualitative research methods: we conducted a survey applying standardized questionnaires as well as in-depth interviews using open guidelines. Survey data allow...

The vast majority of respondents (63 percent) had made only one trip to the respective host country. Twenty-five percent had made between two and four trips and only 12 percent had traveled more than four times.1 The average length of the time spent as OFW was 3.5 years (std. dev. 2). The data indicate that working overseas formed a distinct period in the lives of the majority of...

“200 distressed OFWs are repatriated home from the Middle East”;1 “DFA can’t track family of Filipino killed in Iraq”;2 “Family of OFW facing execution in Saudi Arabia seeks help”3: In the Philippines, the fate of OFWs, their success stories, and their sufferings are an everyday topic in the media, private conversations,...

Does migration affect the political socialization of labor migrants and if so, in which way? This question served as the starting point of our study. The following chapter presents the findings on migrants’ political attitudes and discusses the effects of the migration experiences described in the previous chapter. It is constituted of three main parts. The first shows migrants’...

Our initial hypotheses focused on the effects of the host country’s political system on migrants’ political attitudes. However, the data suggest that the migration experience as such, regardless of the destination, makes a difference. Especially with regard to the assessment of the outcomes of the political system, respondents who had been abroad were significantly more dissatisfied...

A comprehensive appendix is available online and includes:

Dr. Christl Kessler has studied political science, sociology, and psychology at the Free University of Berlin and received her PhD in political science from the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany. She was senior research fellow at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute for sociocultural research, Freiburg. Her research interests include political relevance of religion,...