No Exit from Exit: The Party Politics of Emigration in the European Union

Abstract

In the last two decades, amid EU enlargement and the Eurozone crisis, many European coun-tries have experienced large-scale population loss through intra-EU mobility, fueling skill and labour shortages, population ageing and democratic backsliding. Yet emigration has attracted far less scholarly attention than immigration, and its specific political consequences for govern-ing parties in origin states remain poorly understood. This dissertation addresses that gap by asking: how do governing parties in EU origin states navigate a problem they cannot solve? The dissertation argues that emigration constitutes a structurally blame-laden issue: it is highly visible, readily attributed to domestic political and economic conditions, and nearly impossible to address through available policy instruments. Two constraints are central. Legally, EU free movement law makes it impossible for national governments to restrict exit or force emigrants to return. Structurally, the main drivers of emigration – e.g., persistent wage gaps, labour market dysfunction, and migration networks – cannot be reversed within a single legislative term. Three empirical articles examine governing parties’ responses to emigration at successive lev-els. The first (“Emigration – Who Cares?”), drawing on 938 party manifestos across all 27 EU member states (2004–2023), maps how, and under what conditions and by whom emigration is politicised. The second (“Please come back!”) analyses an original dataset of 81 national-level emigrant return policies across 17 member states (2004–2023) and gives insights into why gov-ernments adopt such programmes despite their limited effectiveness. The third (“Who Gets to Return?”) uses the same dataset alongside case studies of Ireland and Portugal to show how the universalist rhetoric of return policies masks systematic, party-family-specific selectivity in who actually receives meaningful return incentives. Taken together, the three articles point to a dual political logic of blame avoidance and distributive politics: blame avoidance explains the framing of emigration and the need for visible action, while distributive politics explains why that action takes partisan and selective forms.

Die Dissertation ist gesperrt bis zum 02. August 2028 !