Replication Data for: Who Decides Who Gets In? Diplomats, Bureaucrats, and Visa Issuance

Does resident diplomacy influence international outcomes? Theoretically, I argue that resident diplomats adopt uniquely cooperative or accommodating stances towards their hosts. I test this expectation using a natural experiment involving British visa issuance. Starting in 2007, the UK transferred the authority to issue visas from local diplomatic missions to centralized hubs. I study this rollout to credibly estimate the causal effects of visa adjudication by local diplomatic posts as opposed to outside hubs. I find that resident diplomats implement a much more lenient visa policy -- transferring adjudication to a hub reduces visa issuance by about fifteen percent. In the aggregate, changing the location of visa adjudication led Britain to issue roughly 150,000 fewer visas in 2019 alone.