The electoral impact of a large return migration shock in a nascent democracy.

In this paper, we study the causal impact of a large and unexpected repatriation episode on election outcomes during a democratic transition that was characterized by severe political and economic instability. We analyse how the forced return of close to half a million settlers from Portuguese speaking African countries, motivated by the eruption of civil wars in these territories, influenced election outcomes after the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal. We apply a difference-in-differences with a continuous treatment assignment based on the share of repatriates per municipality. To deal with potential endogeneity problems, we instrument this with two shift-share variables levering on very detailed census data covering the universe of repatriates and including information on their regions of birth. We find that repatriates significantly increased voting for right-wing parties in the ten years after the Revolution.