In the Spotlight: Diasporas and Political Mobilization

With Eva Østergaard-Nielsen

Liz Morán and Kali Hanson

Since the 1980s, we have observed an explosive increase in the number of countries that have extended the right to vote from abroad. As a result, today diasporas play a more prominent role in politics than in the past, with the members of diasporas having the possibility to build bridges between States and to promote democracy both in their countries of residence and in their countries of origin.

As this year millions will head to the polls, it is important to reflect on diasporas and political mobilisation and to ask ourselves what role diasporas play in electoral processes. This interview aims to shed light on such a topic thanks to the insights of Professor Eva Østergaard-Nielsen.

Q1.

Research points that, in many cases, intra-European diasporas are quite populous and their vote can make a difference in national elections. Is this a statement that your research at MIGRADEMO proves that it can be generally extrapolated to diasporas? What role do diasporas play in the electoral and democratic processes of their countries of origin?

We do have examples worldwide of the diaspora vote making a difference in the outcome of the election in their country of origin. But one also has to say that the number of elections where this happened is quite limited compared to how many elections diasporas can vote in. This is because turnout is often low, and it has to be a really close election for the diaspora vote to make a difference in the outcome.

So, we do have cases. For instance, there is the case of Italy in 2006, in which the diaspora vote gave [former Italian Prime Minister Romano] Prodi the majority in the Senate with just one seat. There is also the case of Romania with the 2009 presidential election, where the diaspora vote was decisive and it gathered a lot of attention and was quite influential for the mobilisation of parties abroad. Other cases include Cape Verde, Hungary, New Zealand, and Uruguay. But I think what’s important maybe is a distinction between decisive and influential – I mean there are cases where the diaspora vote boosted certain parties, although it does not necessarily lead to their subsequent win. I think this is still an important role to play from afar.

“There is also the concept of social remittances. Migrants and diasporas may talk to their families and friends at home, explain their situation abroad and discuss economic and political affairs and thereby transfer norms and ideas to their country of origin at the individual and micro-level.”

What we have done at MIGRADEMO – as so do other research projects – is to also look at other ways in which migrants or diasporas can be influential in democratic processes in their countries of origin. For instance, from afar, the migrants can send remittances – which is a fairly big deal for many countries of origin. There is research and literature that shows a democratic impact of this money transfer: the families that receive this money may also then change their electoral behaviour and this can also have an impact in elections on countries of origin. For example, there is research that shows that in contexts with a lot of clientelism, families with migrants abroad that received money may have a lower turnout in elections or be less likely to vote for the incumbent ruling parties.

There is also the concept of social remittances. Migrants and diasporas may talk to their families and friends at home, explain their situation abroad and discuss economic and political affairs and thereby transfer norms and ideas to their country of origin at the individual and micro-level. There are other factors, such as return migration – migrants who return to their countries of origin may bring back with themselves different perspectives –so these are all ways through which migrants can influence electoral and democratic processes at home beyond casting their vote.

In MIGRADEMO we’ve done research and surveys in regions of high out-migration, qualitative work, and interviews with return migrants in civil society and among political elites. However, as other research teams, we were hit by the [Covid-19] pandemic and we could not really go to the field to research these other issues. During the pandemic, we started setting up a dataset called Emigrant Voting Patterns (EVP), in which we collected data on what emigrants vote in their country of origin insofar possible per country of residence – that is to say, not just all the Italians abroad in the Italian election in 2006 and 2008 and so on, but the vote of Italians in Argentina, the Italians in Spain, and in the US – in order to see whether there was some sort of destination effect on the emigrant vote. However, collecting information on this is quite cumbersome. Sometimes, you just have the total number of votes posted on the electoral website of the country in question. I think we contacted almost all countries in the world and we have 43 countries of origin that communicated the vote per countries of destination. We have 217 destinations and 1267 elections. It is a big data set, and  we are doing research now to discern any patterns.

[At present], we have a paper under review with Laurence Go and Nicolas Fliess that shows, I think interestingly, that turnout in homeland elections is also related to the timing of elections in the country of residence. So, within a timespan, the closer the two are together, emigrants and diasporas tend to vote more in homeland elections when there was recently an election in the country of residence. Moreover, we are now doing research on the difference in the vote – is the vote from abroad different from the vote in the home country?  This is very complicated to do, obviously. It seems that the emigrant vote from afar is more pro-democratic, that there are more votes for pluralist parties, the larger the political distance between the country of origin and country of residence. That is to say, when emigrants move from “less to more democracy”, there seems to be a pattern of voting for more pro-pluralist parties. So, this is still preliminary and a work in progress, but is the direction our research is looking at now.

Q2.

Nonresident external voting is costlier in terms of time, effort, attention, and sometimes also financially, than voting “at home”. Despite these setbacks, why do diasporas mobilise to vote? What variables and factors push them to do so?

I think this is a correct observation; when we try to explain voting, it is a cost-benefit analysis. But I think it is also important to mention that it is also costly for countries to extend voting rights to citizens residing abroad. The other thing, first off, is to say that voting rights for emigrants are very different from case to case. There are many different modalities through which diasporas can vote: in some cases, you have to drive for hours to your nearest consulate; in other cases, you need to register way in advance, which is also a big obstacle; in some cases, you can vote by mail; and a few countries have allowed online voting which is way less costly compared to the other modalities. So, we must take into account how easy the country of origin makes it to vote from afar.

The other thing to emphasise is that turnout, in general, is low among diasporas compared to the country of origin. So, many emigrants do not bother to turn up or make this effort. Why is that? It is an important question, but we still do not have full answers to why the turnout is low. It is a complicated scenario with lots of different factors to take into account. With Irina Ciornei, some years ago, we did a study in which we showed there is a destination effect: turnout tends to be higher among diasporas and emigrants when moving from, again, “less to more democracy”. This would indicate that moving to a place where turnout is higher or there are different processes during elections may have a spillover effect into the homeland voting of emigrants.

This is a field still dominated by case studies, and what applies to one case does not necessarily do so for another. Still, there is some evidence to show that political interest and engagement in the country of residence does not reduce political participation in homeland processes and vice versa.

Q3.

Do there exist differences in regards to political mobilisation and incentives to vote for first generation and second or third-generation diasporas?

That would be an obvious hypothesis: with time and not being born or having as much contact with the country of origin, the interest would wane, and the turnout would be lower. I think we don’t have enough data on a broader scale to answer such a question. But it ties in with the previous question: why would some emigrants vote and others don’t? I think the first stop here is, of course, the citizenship policies of countries of origin and residence. Not all countries allow dual citizenship, although it is a trend that more countries allow it; How long can you retain your citizenship?; Does it get passed down from your parents and grandparents abroad?; and so on and so forth.

Of course, we could imagine that second and third generations may have fewer incentives and interest in their country of origin. But one could also imagine other factors that could override this, such as education and generally higher levels of interest in politics… it is difficult to say.

To the best of my knowledge, I don’t see a big systematic study that answers this question on a broader scale. One must take into account that unless we have survey data, it doesn’t say anywhere whether the vote is from first, second, or third-generation diaspora. You are a citizen, full-stop. With aggregate data; we can’t unpack this question well enough.

Q4.

Do political parties in their countries of origin specifically target diasporas at some point during electoral campaigning? If yes, how do they do so and how effective is it?

Absolutely! Again, we don’t have data for all elections all over the world, but we do have examples of countries of origin extending their campaigning abroad.

Once the [diaspora and migrant] vote gains more attention in the country of origin – for instance, in the case of Romania after the 2009 presidential elections, where their vote tipped the scale – then more parties would have an incentive to go out and chase this vote. Political parties can do events abroad and send out party leaders to do [political] meetings and engage with diasporas to understand what their specific concerns might be. With Irina Ciornei, some years ago, we did a study of Spain, Romania, Italy, and France where we showed how party political programmes in these countries increasingly had a longer and longer section in which they specifically addressed emigrants as part of the polity: what do they want and need, issues of retaining social security rights, return policies, support for cultural and social issues abroad (school systems, language programmes). But, you also have parties that campaign abroad on homeland political issues and try to rally the vote around this. There is a growing research field on parties ‘going abroad’.

“transnational campaigning and mobilisation at the transnational level with all the costs that this entails, matters. “

When I did my PhD many years ago in the 1990s before Turkey allowed voting from abroad, I went to meetings where Turkish parties were mobilising the Turkish migrants or citizens in Germany and tying both together: mobilising them around the importance of their homeland but also addressing the issues they were facing, at this point, discrimination and exclusion in Germany. This has been going on ever since.

Nowadays, a lot of campaigning is not done through events but online, through social media. Since long, there have been a lot of examples of political parties having specific social media accounts or parts of their websites addressed to the diaspora vote in order to mobilise from afar.

Now, is it effective? There is a paper by Burgess and Tyburski that shows that party outreach leads to higher turnout. They show that transnational campaigning and mobilisation at the transnational level with all the costs that this entails, matters. But one has to understand also that this is complicated for parties to do and the benefits might not be so high, so there is a cost-benefit analysis of parties in terms of how many resources they want to allocate to cater to this part of the electorate.

Q5.

In 1980, only 21 countries enfranchised citizens abroad, whereas by 2020, 141 countries did. Why are countries of origin and their politicians increasingly interested in keeping ties with diasporas?

The trend is quite staggering; emigrant enfranchisement has boomed. There are quite a lot of studies on this. The research field mainly started off with a more political theoretical reflection: should emigrants be allowed to vote in homeland elections? And, if they should, based on what? Ethnic or national identity, residence/time spent abroad, *stakeholder theory? It is an interesting debate.

The second debate was to try to understand why so many countries have enfranchised citizens abroad. There are many theories. Some of the general dimensions across comparative studies have been, first, emigrant lobbying: emigrants want this vote and they present it to their homeland government and political parties, sometimes emigrants carry more weight economically in their country of origin, or maybe there is a specific historical justification for them leaving and now from afar wanting to have a voice in homeland politics. Second, we have window of opportunities’ theories, so take Spain as an example. Spain enfranchised Spanish citizens to vote from abroad in the transition to democracy. You see this in many other cases as well, that in a transition to democracy or a very important power shift, the emigrant voting rights get included in the general overhaul of the constitution and the inclusiveness of the franchise. Third, you have domestic politics. Some parties may push for this vote because they believe having this vote coming in from afar might be in their interest or they might have a specific political overall outlook that includes attention to this part of the nation.

One important dimension is also policy diffusion. There are arguments that the trend also embeds itself in seeing that other countries are doing this with some success and… why not follow suit? This is an argument used for instance in the case of Latin America in order to explain the trend of outreach policies and extending voting rights.

We did a study with Jean-Michel Lafleur and Irina Ciornei, just in Europe, in which we saw that the main drivers of the process of emigrant enfranchisement were centre-right parties. Where you have the left or centre-left pushing for more rights for immigrants, it was the centre-right who would most strongly argue or put the crucial proposal at the time for having emigrant voting rights.

Another important dimension to mention is that not only democracies extend the right to vote to emigrants. We have quite a lot of “electoral autocracies”, that also extend the right to vote to emigrants. This is something I am researching now with Nicholas Fliess. It is kind of a puzzle: autocracies generally want to control elections, so why extend the vote to emigrants when it is much harder to control elections abroad? This is ongoing work, but in general, there is a trend to try to understand outreach policies from autocracies in terms of understanding autocratic survival, which is based on the pillars of repression, legitimization, and co-optation. Voting rights in this perspective is also about controlling and legitimising vis-à-vis the citizens abroad, both in terms of the direct relationship with the citizenry that lives elsewhere, but also with their countries of residence. There can be a signalling value as well, in terms of installing a democratic right sometimes in the context of some form of power transition.

So, there are a lot of factors and arguments, but we must distinguish between different political regimes, processes, and junctures in domestic politics, power struggles and partisan interests in the country of origin, and then, of course, what the emigrants want.

Q6.

Does diasporic attachment — passive or active — hinder immigrant integration?

No, not necessarily! We still need to understand this better as we don’t have a lot of data. We have the emigrant voting pattern dataset, which is aggregate date (what do all migrants in this country vote?). However, one collective or citizens from one country is usually not very homogenous. There can be different groups within this diaspora based on ethnicity, education, class, type of migration, and so on and so forth.

So, in order to answer this question better, we need micro-data: we need to understand specifically that person and their situation, socioeconomic characteristics, political engagement in the country of residence, etc. However, for a long time, we have had studies, both qualitative research and some surveys, that have shown that there is not a zero-sum relationship between incorporation in the country of residence and engagement in the country of origin. In fact, I tried to argue many years ago, based on qualitative research, that these processes may reinforce each other: as a diaspora, you may go and lobby and be engaged on behalf of your homeland in the politics of your country of residence and that is an entry point into the politics of the country of residence, or vice versa.

“One has to remember that it is a globalised world. The politics of one country are important to the politics of another, and maybe one does not always have to think about processes of political engagement here and there in completely separate or dualistic terms.”

One has to remember that it is a globalised world. The politics of one country are important to the politics of another, and maybe one does not always have to think about processes of political engagement here and there in completely separate or dualistic terms. There is quite a bit of ongoing research on this topic right now. Do migrants bring with them their political orientations? Does attachment to the homeland change in the country of residence through processes of political re-socialization?

It is also relevant to notice that while the increase of countries granting voting rights has boomed, I am not sure we can say that the countries of residence have followed suit in terms of more inclusive policies and voting rights for immigrants there. It could be thought that it’s a bit paradoxical that migrants can move to a country and pay taxes there, and in general incorporate themselves in their country of residence, but they can only vote in their country of origin and not residence. Sometimes, migrants may have a dual embeddedness or a transnational political orientation, but can mainly express it in the ballot box in the country of origin.

You can see how many factors may intervene in these processes. We need to unpack this better to understand it, but in terms of the vote there is no real evidence that diasporic attachment somehow hinders political integration in the country of residence.

*Stakeholder theory: immigrants should be allowed to vote as long as they have some sort of stake in their country of origin, which may not be the case for second or third-generation diasporas.

Eva Østergaard-Nielsen is a Professor of Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She holds degrees in Anthropology and Political Science from Copenhagen University and a PhD in Politics from the University of Oxford/ St. Antony’s College. She has been a research fellow at the London School of Economics, a visiting senior researcher at the Danish Institute of International Studies, and a Marie S. Curie Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

Østergaard-Nielsen has been the lead researcher and participated in a range of projects funded at the international, European, or national level. From 2018-2024 she is the principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant (726406) Migration and Democratic Diffusion: the Impact of Migration on Democratic Practices and Processes in Countries of Origin (MIGRADEMO).

MIGRADEMO examines the impact of migration on democratic participation and processes in countries of origin. It is hosted by the Department of Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The project is an ambitious long-term comparative research strategy to analyse and theorise the scope and dynamics of processes of democratic diffusion through migration.