As the number of countries allowing their citizens to vote from abroad has increased over the past three decades, so too has political science scholarship on external voting. Much of this work has been based either on single-country case studies or on empirical analyses of cross-national data mainly from Europe and Latin America. With this book, Katrina Burgess provides a much-needed contribution to the growing literature through a comparative case analysis of migrant–homeland relations across four countries: Turkey, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, and Mexico. Moving beyond an earlier emphasis in the literature on why states extend voting rights to citizens abroad (e.g., Jean-Michel Lafleur, Transnational Politics and the State: The External Voting Rights of Diasporas, 2013), Burgess focuses instead on the extent to which migrants take advantage of these transnational rights. She touches on the “full repertoire of migrant engagement” (p. 6) but gives particular attention to extraterritorial voter turnout.

After laying out key concepts in chapter 1, Burgess provides an overview of her theoretical framework in chapter 2. Central to her argument is the notion that states make diasporas by determining the extent to which they want to cultivate loyalty among their migrants, meaning that not all migrants will be included in the constructed diaspora. At the same time, migrants make states, both in the sense that migrants’ profiles influence whether they will be targeted for loyalty cultivation and because migrants often lobby for recognition and representation as members of the national community.

Burgess selects her cases based on their variation in diaspora turnout in recent elections, although she acknowledges the challenges of determining turnout when the denominator is uncertain. Using available data, she calculates diaspora turnout as a share both of migrant stocks and of registered diaspora voters. In a sample of 24 countries that she examined in an empirical analysis with Michael Tyburski (published separately in Electoral Studies, though it would have been useful to include here), Turkey had the highest diaspora turnout and the Dominican Republic was above average, whereas turnout rates in the Philippines and Mexico were much lower. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the dynamics within each country that led migrants to move abroad, the situations they face in host countries, and the basic demographic profiles of each migrant group.

Drawing from past literature on domestic voter turnout, chapter 4 explores multiple explanations for the variation in diaspora turnout across these four countries. Resource models that focus on migrants’ socioeconomic status, population density, and length of time abroad have found some support in the empirical literature and help explain three of the four cases, especially Turkey, but cannot explain notoriously low diaspora turnout in Mexico. Institutional models emphasizing the ease of registration, ease of voting, and types of elections in which the diaspora can participate also have been shown to be significant determinants of diaspora turnout in the aggregate, but they lead to contradictory predictions for the four countries under examination here. Burgess thus turns instead to the mobilization model, which “performs consistently well in studies of domestic turnout but has received very little treatment in the literature on extraterritorial voting” (p. 89).

In the remainder of the book, Burgess explains variation in migrant engagement across the cases largely as the result of differing levels of outreach by home-country states and political parties. In emphasizing the mobilization model, however, Burgess does not abandon the resources and institutional models. Indeed, a key aspect of her argument is that there are “interactive feedback loops” (p. 88) among these factors. Perhaps most obviously, and consistent with arguments by Lafleur and others, home-country authorities determine the electoral rules that apply to diaspora voters; those rules vary depending on the profiles of the migrants themselves, including the extent of their support for the incumbent party. (For a recent empirical analysis along these lines, see Elizabeth Iams Wellman, “Emigrant Inclusion in Home Country Elections: Theory and Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa,” American Political Science Review, 115, 2021). By determining who constitutes the diaspora, states therefore shape migrant engagement.

Moving to the heart of the comparative analysis, chapter 5 examines efforts by home-country authorities in Turkey and the Dominican Republic to actively mobilize their diasporas. In both cases, migrants left home during earlier periods of authoritarian rule, which generated transnational opposition party activity. When those opposition leaders eventually gained control of the state, they sought to incorporate migrants into domestic politics through external voting and other outreach initiatives. Whether this diaspora-making project was state led (Turkey) or party led (Dominican Republic), it resulted in comparatively high levels of migrant political engagement.

Chapter 6, in contrast, explores the depoliticization of diasporas in the Philippines and Mexico. With economic factors having driven much of the migration in these cases, “parties had little transnational presence prior to diaspora-making and were easily crowded out once the state decided to extend its reach into transnational spaces” (p. 149). Concerned about possible electoral implications at home, authorities in both countries largely discouraged diaspora political participation (illustrated most clearly by Mexico’s 2005 law against campaigning abroad), even as they cultivated economic loyalty through remittances and investment.

In chapter 7, Burgess explores the ways in which diasporas make states. Across all four countries, migrants pushed for rights such as dual citizenship and external voting, conforming to state diaspora-building projects in some cases and challenging them in others. Another important point that comes through in this chapter, though the author makes it only in passing, is that Mexican and Filipino politicians were “wary of an electorate whose preferences they could not predict, never mind control” (p. 181). Indeed, the unpredictability of the external vote would seem to go a long way toward explaining the depoliticization of the diaspora in these countries. (Similar dynamics have been at play in Kenya, for example, limiting the implementation of diaspora voting there. See Elizabeth Iams Wellman and Beth Elise Whitaker, “Diaspora Voting in Kenya: A Promise Denied,” African Affairs, 12, 2021.) In contrast to the other two cases where external voting was expanded by incumbents who could count on diaspora support, it may have been useful to explore the importance of electoral calculations to parties’ mobilization strategies.

To the extent that there is anything to criticize about this impressive volume, the author herself acknowledges these shortcomings. By emphasizing the strategic calculations of states and diasporas, Burgess effectively treats them as unitary actors instead of exploring the many competing interests within these groups (p. 32). Similarly, there is some blurring of the lines between states and political parties when it comes to the discussion of mobilization strategies. Finally, and perhaps most noticeably, this book about migrant engagement gives surprisingly little attention to the voices of migrants themselves. I agree with the author’s call for “much more ethnographic and interview data” (p. 201), which would provide a deeper understanding of how diverse groups of migrants make sense of their own engagement in home-country politics.

Overall, as one of the few cross-regional comparative case analyses of external voting, this book makes several important contributions. It brings together literature on transnational politics and democratization, using theories of domestic turnout to better understand extraterritorial voter turnout. It will thus be useful to scholars studying a range of related topics. Importantly, the book is explicitly comparative in its organization and approach. Instead of relegating each case to a separate chapter, Burgess organizes the book thematically, systematically comparing and contrasting multiple countries within each chapter. Although this approach can seem disjointed at first, particularly in chapter 4 when the reader is first introduced to the cases, it ultimately leads to a better understanding of the cross-national patterns that shape migrant engagement. Even within this structure of systematic comparison, Burgess provides rich details about each country, allowing the reader to see both the forest and the trees.