Residency and reciprocity: Does migration impact inclusion in the moral economy?

Migration, induced by climate change, conflict, and population growth, has increased in the 50 years since Scott (1977) described community cooperation as an organizing principle of peasant life. How does migration impact social insurance and reciprocity norms in African countries with high rates of rural migration? Are newcomers expected to conform to community institutions of cooperation or to defect? We examine the impacts of residency on reciprocity in Malawi and Zambia. We use a survey experiment to show that respondents in both countries are significantly less likely to believe that a migrant neighbor would cooperate in local public goods provision, dyadic reciprocity ties, or sharing access to natural resources. Furthermore, we find evidence of sanctioning as a mechanism driving these results; migrants are expected to be significantly less compliant with the community sanctioning than long-term residents. Migration has a larger and more consistent effect than ethnicity in the 12,000-respondent sample, indicating the need to conceptually and empirically separate the effects of ethnicity from residency in studies of cooperation. In addition, the results indicate that the effects of residency on expectations of cooperation cross-cut the salient ethnic cleavages in sampled communities. As beliefs about others’ behaviors are critical for the conditional cooperation dynamics that generate social insurance, these results shed light on the boundaries of community reciprocity networks that are the foundation of the moral economic approach.