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For those fleeing violent political conflict home-country politics may be uniquely challenging. Given the high stakes which refugees are more likely to engage in home country politics? This article focuses on two sets of factors: experiences of hardship in the context of emigration, transiting and settling to their destination country; and the ongoing social ties to family and friends left behind. For our analysis, we draw on a recently collected nationally representative survey of Syrian refugees in Canada (N = 1974). We find that among those resettled in Canada, experiences of hardships in Syria and while in transit in their interim country are associated with less engagement in the political affairs of Syria. On the other hand, those who have a harder time settling into life in Canada also tend to remain more interested in home-country politics. In contrast to some findings in research on labour migrants, those who maintain close personal ties to friends and family back in Syria remain more engaged with politics. Together, the findings highlight the unique pressures refugees face and the role these pressures may have on continued interest in the political affairs of their home country after migrating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Survey research on migrants is notoriously challenging, especially if the goal is to collect data across a range of countries. Social networking sites’ ability to micro-target advertisements to migrant communities combined with their near-global reach makes them an attractive option. Yet there is little rigorous evaluation of the quality of data thus collected—especially for populations from developing countries. We compare samples of Nigerian emigrants in Canada and Italy and Nigerians (at home) in Nigeria recruited through targeted advertising on Facebook and Instagram to population estimates. We find our samples contain varying degrees of bias in the case of age and gender and systematically miss those with little formal education. How much this affects our samples’ representativeness varies across contexts: discrepancies are much smaller for emigrant populations in Canada than in Italy and much larger in Nigeria, where a large share of the population has little formal education and limited literacy. Post-stratifying each sample on age, gender, and education does not ameliorate bias on other variables such as ethnicity, religion, period of migration, or political attitudes. We discuss the potential and limitations of social-media-driven sampling and highlight key considerations for implementing it to collect multi-sited data on migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]