Citizens of the Market: New Forms of International Migration and their Consequences for People, Parties and Political Systems

Abstract

How does high-mobility migration affect politics in the migrants' countries of origin? This dissertation examines the socio-political effects of intra-EU migrations using quantitative and qualitative data from Romania and Poland, two of the European Union's main migrant-sending countries. The project makes a triple contribution. First, it analyzes on multiple levels the impact of free movement, producing a complete picture of systemic political transformation. It examines shifts in migrants' worldviews, political attitudes and attachments (micro-level ethnography); changes in the electoral appeal of political parties in regions with relatively higher citizen mobility (meso-level quantitative analysis of Polish voivodships and Romanian judete); and the strategies migrant-sending countries use to cope with the challenges of free movement. Second, unlike sociological, economic and ethnographic studies of recent migratory flows, which treat the phenomenon's political dimension as a side effect, this project anchors the research agenda in mainstream political science by placing the state-citizen relationship at the core of the inquiry as a conceptual benchmark for understanding migration-related political evolutions. Third, by focusing on EU-associated free movement, it sheds light on a special case of international mobility that departs from previous population movements associated with globalization. As the dimensions of citizenship (civil, political and social) become unbundled, economic rights and access to the European supranational market are the elements governments use to compensate citizens for the erosion of welfare state citizenship. I introduce the concept of citizenship of the market to reflect this development. By analyzing the recalibration of the state-citizen relationship in high-mobility contexts, the project provides answers to questions that scholarship of immigration, political transnationalism, and diaspora management fail to address. The findings show that EU-triggered change does not occur only top-down, via government reform and political elites, but also bottom-up, under the influence of societal actors and new political power groups.