  In this comment, I revisit the question raised in Karadja and Prawitz (2019)
concerning a causal relationship between mass emigration and long-run political
outcomes. I discuss a number of potential problems with their instrumental
variable analysis. First, there are at least three reasons why their instrument
violates the exclusion restriction: (i) failing to control for internal
migration, (ii) insufficient control for confounders correlated with their
instrument, and (iii) emigration measured with a nonclassical measurement
error. Second, I also discuss two problems with the statistical inference, both
of which indicate that the instrument does not fulfill the relevance condition,
i.e., the instrument is not sufficiently correlated with the endogenous
variable emigration. Correcting for any of these problems reveals that there is
no relationship between emigration and political outcomes.
