Policy positions on emigrant voting rights

Position in this context refers to the substantive view of the party on a specific issue (Laver, Reference Laver2001; Pogorelis et al., Reference Pogorelis, Maddens, Swenden and Fabre2005; Bélanger and Meguid, Reference Bélanger and Meguid2008). Studies, so far, rely on a variety of sources in order to infer party positions such as party manifestos, expert surveys, voters’ perceptions of party stances or roll-call voting (Krouwel and van Elfrinkhof, Reference Krouwel and Van Elfrinkhof2013). However, the policy area of emigrant citizenship and voting rights is in contrast to issues of immigrant rights, not included in any of the broader databases of party positions currently available. A recent study (at the level of the European Parliament) suggests that parliamentary speeches may also constitute an important source of information for the understanding of the ideology and positioning of parties (Proksch and Slapin, Reference Proksch and Slapin2010). Following this suggestion, we examine the position of parties in a selection of recent debates on the granting or (substantial) reform of emigrant voting rights.

Framing of policy positions on emigrant voting rights

A growing body of literature focuses on how parties frame their position on different policies. In this optic, frames are the set of arguments that a party uses to explain and justify its stance towards a particular policy (Helbling, Reference Helbling2014). The analysis of frames can nuance the understanding of the positioning of parties and may point to linkages with their overall outlook.

Similarly to Helbling (Reference Helbling2014), our strategy to develop frames has been both inductive and deductive. We used past empirical work to identify arguments used in political debates leading to the adoption of external voting laws in Europe and Latin America (Lafleur, Reference Lafleur2013). In addition, we have grounded our frame categorization in theories of democratic inclusion and citizenship and the literature on diaspora policies. This combination of inductive and deductive strategy helps us include potentially important arguments a priori while also enabling us to categorize arguments under more general frame categories.

Demos-related frames are those used by political parties to justify their position on external voting based on their vision of what constitutes a cohesive political community. They consist of mobilizing ideas and principles defining citizenship that are used as arguments to assess the legitimacy of granting or refusing citizens abroad a say in home country politics. From the normative theory literature and previous empirical analysis, we can identify three types of demos-related frames.

The first are territorial frames inspired by Dahl’s principle of full inclusion (Dahl, Reference Dahl1989), according to which the demos of a democratic polity comprise ‘all adults subject to the binding collective decisions of the association’ (p. 129). In this frame, the residency requirement is not just a practical limitation to external voting. Actors question the idea that citizens abroad are affected by the laws passed by the representatives they elected (López-Guerra, Reference López-Guerra2005).

Ethnic frames are the second type of demos-related frames and mirror the arguments of those who adopt the territorial frame. It consists of the use of a definition of citizenship based on ancestry that disregards residency and contemporary connections with the homeland as legitimate criteria for the exclusion of citizens abroad from the electorate. Authors such as Gans (Reference Gans2003) have defended the extension of voting rights to citizens abroad because ‘(…) rights are based on the interests that all members of a national group might have in their nationality, and not only on the interests of those who are in fact citizens of the state’ (Gans, Reference Gans2003).

Stakeholder frames represent an intermediary position between the two above-mentioned frames. Scholars like Bauböck (Reference Bauböck2007) and Owen (Reference Owen, Calder, Cole and Seglow2009) denounce the illusion that citizens abroad are not affected by decisions taken in the home country. However, Bauböck (Reference Bauböck2007) considers the principle of affected interest too vague as a basis to allocate political rights. He uses instead the concept of stakeholder, to suggest that beyond having a fundamental interest in the outcomes of the political process, citizens abroad must also have a claim to be represented as participants in that process. For this reason, arguments in favour of external voting that belong to the stakeholder frame may include additional conditions such as a period of prior residence in the home country.

Democratic–egalitarian frames are used to support or reject external voting on the basis of principles that supersede the interests of the nation-state. Political parties use universal principles such as democracy, human rights, and equality as benchmarks to compare their own position on external voting with the external voting legislation of other states that are recognized as equally or more democratic. The underlying objective is thus to demonstrate that their position is the closest to the body of international principles and regulations that they consider define a modern democratic state. We identified two types of democratic–egalitarian frames.

First, human rights frames include arguments on the universal nature of voting rights and posit that the exclusion of external voters contradicts the indisputable right of citizens to regularly express their opinion on the government of their state of nationality. As illustrated by the work of Nohlen and Grotz (Reference Nohlen and Grotz2000), specific arguments in the human rights frame include the idea that the full realization of the principle of universal suffrage commends that citizens abroad be allowed to vote.

Second, equality frames consist of comparing the position of citizens abroad with that of other individuals who also have claims for political participation towards the same state. Most notably, however, equal rights frames are also used to express conditional support in favour of external voting reforms in exchange for legislative reforms in the area of voting rights for foreigners residing in the national territory. Similarly, equality frames may be used to justify restrictions in external voting on the basis that dual citizens could be allowed to vote in the national elections of two countries.

Electoral integrity frames are the third category of frames we identified and rely on the idea that external voting legislation cannot overlook the impact of such practice on electoral processes and emigrants. First, process protection frames consist of opposing or supporting external voting based on its anticipated impact on the reliability of the electoral process as a whole. Electoral integrity frames therefore often mobilize arguments on the level of accountability of actors involved in electoral processes abroad. Second, emigrant protection frames argue that campaigns and electoral processes abroad may trigger positive or negative reactions from the emigrants’ host country authorities. When countries in conflict or post-conflict situations organize elections abroad, these situations often trigger concerns about security or the importation of foreign conflicts in countries of residence (Lafleur, Reference Lafleur2013). While a comparable situation is less likely to occur with EU migrants, political parties may argue that homeland voting call the emigrants’ loyalty towards their country of residence into question.

The fourth category of frames consists of utilitarian frames, which approach external voting primarily from a cost–benefit analysis that stronger transnational political connections would generate for the homeland. These frames focus on the expected impact that external voters would have on the home country’s public finances, parties’ performances, and the level of electoral participation (turnout).

Global diaspora frames use migrants’ contributions through remittances and investments to legitimize the implementation of external voting procedures, which often represent a high cost for the public finances. While few countries actually tax citizens abroad, political parties who support external voting may equate the ‘no taxation without representation’ argument to the situation of emigrants who send large amounts of remittances to their homeland but are not entitled to vote from abroad. Less directly, global diaspora frames also posit that granting external voting rights stimulates emigrants’ connections with their homeland and therefore fosters the creation of a global network of citizens abroad who can be activated in the economic or political interest of their homeland (Gamlen, Reference Gamlen2008).

Partisan interest frames are based on the expected electoral gains or losses that the inclusion of external voters is expected to generate in comparison to an electoral process in which voters abroad would not be included. These frames are usually not used by parties to explicitly justify their opposition or support based on the negative or positive impact of external voters on their own electoral performances. Rather, political parties draw on these frames more indirectly to refer to the impact this vote is expected to have on their competitors. That is, the expected electoral gains of competitors can be used as an argument to discredit the adoption of external voting legislation on the basis that it would be guided by partisan interests only. Examples of such practices in Latin America and Europe have been documented in a non-systematic way in Europe and Latin America (see Lafleur, Reference Lafleur2011).

Emigrant-engagement frames are the last type of utilitarian frames and refer to positions on external voting that compare efforts and resources required in implementing external voting reforms with the expected voter turnout abroad. Low levels of participation among citizens residing abroad (or the expectation of it) are often equated with voters’ apathy. Insistence on the emigrants’ unwillingness to make the effort to register and vote thus serves to justify opposition to external voting. Conversely, emigrant engagement frames also refer to arguments that equate low turnout with cumbersome bureaucratic procedures.

Finally we have identified policy learning frames. Recent political science work on the topic has shed light on regional dynamics and processes of democratization as variables explaining the international diffusion of external voting. The work of Turcu and Urbatsch (Reference Turcu and Urbatsch2014), in particular, has shown that the adoption of external voting laws by neighbouring states strongly enhances the likelihood for one state to adopt similar legislation. Looking at the Middle East and North Africa region and Latin America, Brand (Reference Brand2014) and Escobar (Reference Escobar2007) have underlined similar dynamics when noting that the diffusion of democracy in the region has usually been accompanied with trends of diffusion of external voting. Policy learning frames are thus political parties’ positions on external voting that explicitly make reference to the necessity to adopt/reform external voting laws in order to adhere to an international or regional practice deemed to epitomize a ‘modern’ electoral system.

Data and methods

We searched for all policies related to emigrant voting rights between 1980 and 2015 and identified 34 policies with a related debate accessible through the parliamentary online search system.Footnote ² After detailing all the steps of the legislative process, we prioritized plenary debates at the stage of the second reading in the lower house.Footnote ³ Akin to the method of Closa and Maatsch (Reference Closa and Maatsch2014), the unit of analysis is the statements of MPs during the debates (see also, Pennings and Keman, Reference Pennings and Keman2002; Dolezal et al., Reference Dolezal, Helbling and Hutter2010).

Within each statement we coded (a) the actor and her political party; (b) the direction of the statement [against (1), ambiguous (2), and in favour (3)]; and (c) the justification of the position, that is, both the general and more specific frame used (see Table 1). If an intervention draws on several justifications, these have been coded as separate entries. During the coding of frames, we revised our initial set of frames along the way and included more sub-frames. Consequently, we have recoded for consistency.

One of the methodological challenges is that a party may not have a unitary position on a policy issue (Krouwel and van Elfrinkhof, Reference Krouwel and Van Elfrinkhof2013). In order to overcome this challenge, we have summarized all the positions of MPs from the same parties and averaged the score. Subsequently, we categorized the party position as follows: a score between 1 and 1.66 is coded as against, 1.67–2.33 is coded as ambiguous, while parties who are in favour have a score higher than 2.33. In order to verify this score, we identified all the available roll calls related to the debates. However, such information is only available in 53.8% of the party observations and cannot be included in a systematic manner. We verified that in 69.2% of the cases, our coding aligns with the roll call. In 20.5% of the cases, the party takes an ambiguous position in the debate but ends up voting against or, more frequently, in favour. The final 10.3% are parties that take a more positive view in the debate but end up voting against.Footnote ⁴

With regard to the explanatory factors of party positions on emigrant voting rights, we rely on the CMP and Parliaments and Governments (Parlgov) databases in order to determine party ideology and party family. Concerning party ideology, we use the variable right-left index (RILE) that constructs an additive measure of left- and right-related statements using factor loadings (Jahn, Reference Jahn2010; Bakker et al., Reference Bakker, de Vries, Edwards, Hooghe, Jolly, Marks, Polk, Rovny, Steenbergen and Vachudova2012).Footnote ⁵ For an alternative measurement of ideology, the analysis uses a nominal variable on party families as coded in the Parlgov data set.Footnote ⁶

Besides ideology we control for a series of other characteristics at the party and country level. One relevant party characteristic is government participation. Government parties may be the initiators of emigration-related policy changes and therefore tend to position themselves in favour of these proposals. In terms of variables related to the debates, we systematically analyse the difference between party support for paradigmatic and incremental policy changes. The type of policy change is captured by a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 for paradigmatic changes and 0 for the incremental ones.

An obvious motive for support of emigrant voting rights is the expected electoral return among parties (Lafleur, Reference Lafleur2011). Parties have been found to pay more attention to emigrant issues in their legislative work if they receive higher shares of emigrant votes (Østergaard-Nielsen and Ciornei, Reference Østergaard-Nielsen and Ciornei2019b). A recent study based on data from Africa argues that the electoral strategic interest of the incumbent government drives emigrant enfranchisement (Wellman, Reference Wellman2019). However, in the debates on the initial implementation of emigrant rights, emigrants are yet to express their political preference through the ballot box. Moreover, several countries do not keep separate official statistics of the voting preferences from abroad. We are therefore only able to estimate the relationship between support for policies extending emigrant voting rights and emigrant electoral support in 12 debates across seven countries.Footnote ⁷

The influence of country-level factors on expansive emigrant voting legislation is captured by introducing the strength of the radical right. The total percentage obtained by the radical right at the elections preceding the policy debate is a relevant indicator for its capacity in influencing other parties on emigration issues. We use ordered logistic regressions with country fixed effects and robust standard error (SE) and logistic regressions with robust SE, respectively (Bryan and Jenkins, Reference Bryan and Jenkins2016).

Party positions on emigrant voting rights

The impact and significance of the factors that influence party positioning are presented in Models 1–4 below (Table 2). Models 1–3 test party-related determinants and use country fixed effects with robust standard errors in order to account for contextual influences. Model 4 introduces the variable on the percentage obtained by the radical right at the most recent election before the debate is analysed.

Table 2.

Determinants of party position on external voting rights. Ordered logistic regression

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * P < 0.10, * P < 0.05, ** P < 0.01, *** P < 0.001

The results in Model 1 show that the relationship between right-wing ideology and party position is positive but not significant when we analyse the entire set of debates. However, we find a significant relationship between party ideology and support for the extension of emigrant rights in Model 2, where we observe that the centre-right party family, composed of Liberals, Conservatives and Christian Democrats are significantly more in favour than all other party families. Importantly, as shown in Model 3, the role of party ideology is mediated by the type of policy in question. The impact of ideology measured on a left-right space is significantly stronger and positive in the context of debates introducing paradigmatic changes to the enfranchisement of emigrants and insignificant in the context of incremental changes related to adjusting minor issues of access and voting modalities related to these rights. Thus, the marginal effect of ideology is 0.003 in contexts with incremental changes and 0.01 in the case of paradigmatic policy change debates. When calculating predicted probabilities, we observe that the probability to support external voting rights for a party on the left (rile = −30) is 79% when paradigmatic changes are at stake and 78% in relation to incremental ones. A party on the right (rile = 30) has a probability of 80 to support incremental changes and 85 the paradigmatic ones.

A qualitative analysis of our data corroborates this finding. Parties debating paradigmatic policy changes tend to have more polarized positions than they do in incremental debates. For instance, a series of smaller parties were against the proposal to eliminate emigrant voting rights in local elections in Spain in 2011, while the debate on registration mechanisms in 1995 did not face any opposition.

Against our expectations, the radical right is not a main champion of emigrant political rights (Model 2). This suggests that the radical right anti-immigrant agenda is not necessarily complemented by a generous position towards emigrants. It is worth noting here that though these parties are referred to as radical right, most of them, with the exception of the parties in Denmark and Italy, have a composite RILE score close to zero. Moreover, this result has to be interpreted with caution since our data set only includes seven parties classified as radical right parties across a total of eight coded debates: the Swiss Peoples Party, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Danish People Party, the Danish Progress Party, the Flemish Block, the Flemish Peoples Union, and the National Alliance and the Northern League in Italy.

A qualitative and contextualized analysis of these parties shows a more complex and ambiguous situation of several of the radical right parties. In the case of Italy, the radical right party of the National Alliance was a long-standing advocate for emigrant voting rights (Lafleur, Reference Lafleur2013). However, in the case of Belgium, other electoral interests overshadowed the support for emigrant rights. The Flemish Peoples Union and the Flemish Block were against the implementation of external voting rights in 1998 because this policy proposal was part of a deal between governing parties which also included extending voting rights to non-national residents, which these two parties strongly opposed.

Model 4 indicates that party competition, in the form of the presence of a strong radical right party in a country, does not have any impact on the positioning of other parties. The results show that in countries with higher levels of electoral success of the far right, party support for external voting rights is not higher than in countries where there is a weak radical right presence. This could follow from the observations that the radical right is not one of the main drivers of emigrant voting rights, indicating that this issue does not have the same salience and politicization dynamics as immigration issues.

Finally, most estimations also show that parties in government are more prone to support the expansion of external voting rights regardless of their ideological position. One explanation is that many of the successful proposals are presented by government parties, albeit other political forces support them or have initially suggested them. Emigrant electoral support is not significant for support for extension of electoral rights, but this variable has only been identified for 40% of the cases and hence these results are only reported in Appendix 2 in Supplementary material.

Other unobserved factors at the country level are significant for explaining party support, as country dummies suggest in Models 1–4. Thus, when compared to Italian parties, only Swedish, Portuguese and Austrian parties are more supportive of emigrant political right extensions. In the case of Sweden, this could relate to the fact that this is an incremental debate on introducing postal voting rights, and in the case of Austria, the policy proposal followed a decision of the Constitutional Court to grant voting rights to emigrants.

Party frames on emigrant voting rights

The arguments used by political parties to motivate their support for or opposition to emigrant voting rights cover all the categories of frames presented in Table 1. Yet, there are differences between the frames used in paradigmatic changes and those used in the incremental ones. As shown in Table 3, the demos-related frames are evoked more during debates on paradigmatic changes of policies on emigrant voting (54.6%) compared to debates on incremental changes (45.4%). This is not surprising given that, in particular, paradigmatic policy changes deal with defining the relationship between the demos and political rights. In contrast, parties refer to the democratic–egalitarian frames in the form of principles of universal suffrage and equality among resident and non-resident citizens in both contexts of paradigmatic and incremental policy changes.

Table 3.

Party framing of external voting rights and type of policy change

Frames related to the category of electoral integrity (process protection) and, in particular, utilitarian frames referring to emigrant engagement and partisan interest are more frequently encountered in debates on incremental policy changes. For instance, in the debates on postal voting in Sweden or Austria, MPs concerned with postal voting referred to the potential impact on the integrity of the secret ballot while arguments in favour of this measure refer to the extent to which it may increase emigrant turnout. Also the frame of partisan interest is slightly more frequent in incremental policy change debates, likely because parties have a better idea about their share of emigrant electoral support than is the case of paradigmatic debates.

Lastly, policy learning frames have mainly been invoked in paradigmatic debates where supporters of extending emigrant enfranchisement refer to the widespread implementation of these rights in other countries. In the 2001 debate in Denmark, the centre-right argues that Denmark is ‘behind’ the rest of Europe in terms of enfranchising citizens abroad. In the Irish debate in 2015, the Sinn Fein MP laments that compared to the 150 countries with emigrant voting rights, the lack of such rights in Ireland ‘is an embarrassment for any government’.

All frames are used to justify positions both for and against extension of emigrant rights but with some important exceptions (Table 4). Framing the access to political rights in terms of the demos-related frame of territorial presence is not surprisingly an argument against voting rights for non-resident citizens, while the ethnic frame is almost exclusively used to justify supportive interventions. For instance, in the UK debate on granting emigrant voting rights in 1985 proposed by the Conservative led government, Labour MPs frequently referred to residential criteria in their opposition to the proposal. A Conservative MP countered with an ethnic framed argument that the overseas voters should be allowed to vote because ‘they are as much British as we are’. The stakeholder argument is mainly used to support extension of emigrant voting rights to emigrants who are somehow involved in the country of origin, though a fourth of the use of this frame is also found in negative or ambiguous interventions. The French Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) representatives and German Liberals consider that in spite of living abroad, emigrants have a meaningful connection with their countries of origin by showing a special interest in staying involved or owning property. Yet, using the same frame, representatives of the French Socialists argue that emigrants do not have a stake in the politics of their countries of origin once they choose to emigrate. In a similar vein, the representatives of both the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and the People’s Party in Spain notice that citizens living abroad do not have any meaningful connection with the localities where they used to reside and should therefore be deprived of local voting rights.

Table 4.

Party framing and positioning on external voting rights

Likewise, the argument that emigrants should have equal rights with co-nationals or immigrants at home is employed in support of both the implementation of voting rights and the forms in which emigrants can cast their ballot from afar. In the case of the Belgian debate on the paradigmatic extension of voting rights to Belgians abroad in 1998, critical interventions warned that the proposed registration and voting modalities put the citizens abroad in a relatively unequal position compared to Belgians living within Belgium. And indeed, the following incremental debate in 2001, provoked by a turnout of only 18 Belgians abroad in the 1999 legislative election, proposed voting modalities more akin to those at home. The arguments related to process protection (electoral integrity) are evoked by parties to justify new types of voting modalities or among parties who worry about the guarantee of basic democratic criteria in cross-border voting. For instance, in the Swiss debate in 2015 on allowing emigrants to vote electronically, both members of the centre-left and centre-right voiced concern with the security and integrity of such a measure.

A cross-tabulation between the frames involved in the debates and party family shows how frames are related to the position of the party on a left-right scale of ideology (Table 5). The most frequently used frame among Communist and Socialist parties is that of demo–egalitarian (40.1% of all frames used) which is a much higher use of this frame compared to other groups of parties. The equality frame (24.8%) dominates within this category as MPs refer mainly to equality with co-nationals but also, in a minority of cases, with reference to the still pending issue of voting rights for immigrants (see below for further discussion). The human rights argument centres on democratic rights as a fundamental right regardless of residence or type of election. This is in line with the recent studies showing that especially leftist parties frame their immigration arguments in terms of human rights (Helbling, Reference Helbling2014). The other main frames used by this party family is the demos-related stakeholder argument.

Table 5.

Framing of external voting rights and party family

The centre-left draws on stakeholder and equality frames akin to the leftist group, but their third most used frame is that of process protection. This frame is mainly used to present critical views on proposals for extending emigrant voting rights across both paradigmatic and incremental debates. In a minority of cases, these parties also use the partisan interest and process protection arguments. An illustrative example is the case of the 2008 debate on the representation of French abroad at the National Assembly that provoked critique from the socialist bloc against constituency redecoupage, perceived as a gerrymandering strategy by the UMP.

The centre-right bloc formed by liberals, Christian democrats and conservatives is the group that tends to drive the extension of emigrant voting rights. To that end, MPs mainly draw on frames of emigrant engagement, equality, and the stakeholder argument. Portuguese and French conservatives have been fervent supporters of policy measures that increase emigrant electoral participation. Similarly in Denmark, centre-right supporters for a constitutional change breaking with the determinant principle of territoriality for voting rights argued that in this day and age Danes abroad can be equally informed, sometimes even better informed, about Danish politics than those in the homeland.

Radical right parties are remarkably similar to the rest of the family groups in their use of frames. Interestingly, the radical right does not draw on ethnic frames. Instead their most used demos-related frame is that of stakeholder and in general they use a similar argumentative strategy as the mainstream parties drawing on the frames of equality, emigrant engagement, and process protection. For instance, the equality frame is used by both the National Alliance and the Northern League in the 2001 Italian debate to argue in favour of postal voting modalities and special representation.

Across all party families, the three most commonly used frames relate to the more pragmatic arguments around emigrants as stakeholders, the need for equality among different groups within the polity, and, in particular in incremental debates, reference to the need to increase levels of emigrant engagement. The fact that parties use largely similar argumentative strategies across the political spectrum could be explained by the lack of politicization of emigrant voting rights by these parties.

The debates on emigrant voting rights are only occasionally related to broader concerns with migration and immigrant policies. Interestingly, left, centre-left, and centre-right parties use a different benchmark of equality in their arguments. In the vast majority of cases, the framing of equality refers to the equality between citizens abroad and at home. However, in a minority of cases, MPs link the debate on extension of emigrant political rights with the enfranchisement of resident non-citizens, immigrants. The right-wing Italian National Alliance make this connection by arguing that voting rights for emigrants should take priority over voting rights for immigrants. However, in particular, centre-left and leftist parties argue the other way around that a logical extension of this debate is to also enfranchise immigrants. For instance, in the 2007 German debate on extension of emigrant voting rights, a representative from the Left party commented that it is disproportionate to grant voting rights to German passport holders who have not been around for decades, while denying the same right to immigrants who have been firmly rooted in Germany for decades. This indicates how the framing of support or opposition to emigrant political rights can form part of the broader ideological package of positions on, for instance, immigrant rights.