I Hate Politics

           Modovan government started paying a special attention to Moldovan extraterritorial communities residing abroad since when the economic statistics showed that about 30% of the national GDP is pumped in Moldova from abroad and since emigrants proved a high electoral commitment during the national elections. Since then the Government developed a special branch called BRD (Bureau of Cooperation with Diaspora) in this manner defining the extraterritorial communities residing abroad as diasporic.            In this post I will try to challenge what government defines as Moldovan diaspora abroad since this community by far does not qualify to this all catchy term of “diaspora”. I will show that Moldovan communities abroad can be rather attributed to short-term migration or trans-migrants assuming a different political functions/attributes these types of communities retain. For proving my point I will need to conce...

In this post I will investigate the impact of remittances on the endurance of non-democratic regimes and the survival of autocratic elites. I will look in particular on whether remittances can influence the prospects of democratization in states with transitory political systems. For this purpose I will brush through the literature that assesses the prospects of the incumbent elites’ to preserve power in remittance-receiving societies using the political patronage resource. Before analyzing the impact of economic remittances let us explain in few words what is political patronage . The main assumption of the patronage theory is that nondemocratic elites cannot solely rely on undisguised force to stay in power since this type of governance is extremely costly to be maintained. That is why the majority of nondemocratic regimes prefer to preserve elements of procedural democracy that help them legitimize their rule. Organized elections are less competitive since a large part of the...

In this post I will try to answer the question whether the emigrants constitute a powerful mechanism to exercise political pressure on the domestic elites to bring institutional reforms and political representation home considering the emigrants right to take part in domestic elections . The emigrants's non-electoral power is discussed in the previous post . I will answer the raised question by resuming the predominant scholarly arguments based on individual observations or large and small N analyzes. This material can be used to understand to which extent Moldova emigration has the possibility to influence the political process home, considering their rights to take part in elections. Research on extraterritorial voting is still scarce considering that historically only few states granted their emigrants the right to vote while abroad (Barry, 2006; Rubio-Marin, 2006; Tager, 2006; Waldrauch, 2003). Yet, in the last decade, states have increasingly created frameworks for dua...