Distant souls: post-communist emigration and voter turnout

Abstract

This article tackles the question of transnational electoral participation resulting from emigration. Drawing on several strands of political science literature, the theoretical section explains why emigration is likely to be detrimental to migrants' voting rates, which specific factors may affect these rates' variation and, overall, when and how emigration impacts nationwide voter turnout. The theory is then tested using original datasets on emigration, legal provisions for external voting and external voting rates in 10 Central and East European postcommunist democracies (CEE-10). The results confirm that external voting rates are much lower than domestic ones and reveal that their cross-national and overtime variation can be, to a large extent, explained by legal provisions for external voting and diaspora size. As a corollary of the weak transnational participation, emigration accounts for approximately one tenth of the fall in voter turnout that has occurred in the CEE-10 since the early 1990s. Note: This is a manuscript accepted for publication in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Does Democratic Consolidation Lead to a Decline in Voter Turnout? Global Evidence Since 1939

“…Moreover, many post-Communist democracies are located near rich Western countries, and these Western democracies attracted a large number of immigrants from post-Communist countries during the post-Communist consolidation period. According to some estimates, East-West migration accounts for several percentage points of the post-Communist decline (Comşa 2015; Kostelka 2017). Future research could use this article as a departure point and include these factors in a comprehensive study of the post-Communist voting rates.…”

Real and perceived voting costs: Lithuanian emigrants’ discourses on external voting difficulty

“…in home country elections (Belchior et al, 2018;Burgess & Tyburski, 2020;Collard, 2013;Hutcheson & Arrighi, 2015;Kostelka, 2017;Merelo, 2017).…”

“…Whilst limited emigrant electoral participation has received increasing attention among migration scholars over the last decade (Belchior et al, 2018;Burgess, 2014;Burgess & Tyburski, 2020;Ciornei & Østergaard-Nielsen, 2020;Escobar et al, 2015;Lafleur & Chelius, 2011;Merelo, 2017;Waldinger & Soehl, 2013), very few works so far have focussed on Central and Eastern European (CEE) emigrant (non)voting (Ahmadov & Sasse, 2015, 2016a, 2016b. This is of particular concern given that emigration constitutes a significant contributor to decreasing turnout rates in the region (Kostelka, 2017). Within CEE, the issue of low emigrant electoral participation is especially important for Lithuania which has been particularly heavily affected by citizen emigration after European Union (EU) accession as well as the Great Recession, and demonstrates the highest emigration-attributable turnout decline (Kostelka, 2017).…”

“…This is of particular concern given that emigration constitutes a significant contributor to decreasing turnout rates in the region (Kostelka, 2017). Within CEE, the issue of low emigrant electoral participation is especially important for Lithuania which has been particularly heavily affected by citizen emigration after European Union (EU) accession as well as the Great Recession, and demonstrates the highest emigration-attributable turnout decline (Kostelka, 2017). In addition to leaving intriguing theoretical questions unanswered, lack of insight into what lies behind emigrant decisions whether or not to vote also precludes policymakers from making informed decisions how to effectively approach and engage abroad-residing enfranchised electorate.…”

Douarin, E; Radu, D; (2021) Drivers of Political Participation: Are Prospective Migrants Different?

“…With this in mind, some have for example attempted to evaluate what the turn-out might have been without migration, in high emigration contexts. Focusing on 10 new EU member states of Central and Eastern Europe, Kostelka (2017) reports a reduction in turnout of around 2.1 percentage-point on average, following mass emigration triggered by the EU freedom of movement policy. However, these calculations were implicitly based on the assumption that emigrants would have had the same propensity to vote as those left-behind, had they not migrated (but explicitly recognising that external voting is not sufficient to maintain participation while abroad).…”