Brother or Invaders? How Crisis-Driven Migrants Shape Voting Behavior

Refugees, Migration and Forced Displacement Seminar

Event time: 

Tuesday, December 1, 2020 - 4:30pm
Location: Virtual Event
Event Details
Speaker: Sandra Rozo, University of Southern California – Marshall School of Business
Event Details: 

Can voter’s negative attitudes toward immigration be explained by self-interest or sociotropic motives? Self-interested voters care about their personal economic circumstances. Sociotropic voters display in-group bias and perceive migrants as threats to their culture. Professor Rozo studies the voting effects forced internal and international migration in Colombia and exploits the disproportionate flows of migrants to municipalities with early settlements of individuals from their origin locations. In line with the sociotropic hypothesis, she finds that only international migration inflows increase political participation and shift votes from left- to right-wing ideologies. These results are not accounted for by the observed changes caused by migrants in socioeconomic variables.
Professor Rozo is a development economist who works at the Marshall School of Business of USC. Her key research topics include:
​- Exploring the effects of forced migration within hosting economies and of the role of public policies in supporting these migrants. Some of her work explores the effects of Syrian refugees in Jordanian’s consumption decisions; the impacts of Venezuelan migrants in voting behavior in Colombia; and the effects of a large scale regularization of forced migrants in Colombia.
- Studying how firms’ decisions change with economic and political shocks. Professor Rozo has studied how firms cope with Syrian refugee migration shocks in Turkey, violent crime in Colombia, and higher diversity in the United States.