External Voting Rights from a Citizen Perspective – Comparing Resident and Non‐resident Citizens' Attitudes towards External Voting

Abstract

The number of countries that have adopted policies allowing emigrants to participate in home country elections from abroad has increased greatly in the last few decades. The enfranchisement of non‐resident citizens in home country elections is, nevertheless, somewhat controversial because it gives political influence to individuals who are unlikely to be affected by the outcome of an election. Despite an active debate on external voting rights among political theorists, little is known what the citizens themselves think of this practice. To examine how both non‐resident and resident citizens perceive external voting rights, we use two surveys of Finnish citizens from 2019. The first survey was directed to Finnish citizens living abroad (n = 1,949), and the second was conducted using an online panel consisting of Finnish citizens living in Finland (n = 994). Both surveys included items with normative questions about external voting rights, which allows us to compare what resident and non‐resident citizens think of the enfranchisement of external citizens. Our findings suggest that resident citizens view external voting rights more negatively than non‐resident citizens. The factors associated with these attitudes are also quite different for the two examined populations. For resident citizens more education and ideological self‐placement to the left is associated with more positive views of external voting rights, while experience of having voted from abroad and dissatisfaction with democracy in the host country is associated with more positive views among non‐resident citizens.

With pulling ties, electoral participation flies: factors mobilising turnout among non-resident Finnish voters

“…While the outputs of political decision-making may not have the same implications for non-resident citizens as they do for residents, non-residents are still subject to certain laws and policies, especially those concerning constitutional matters and citizenship (Honohan 2011;Owen 2011). Furthermore, if non-resident citizens own property or have close relatives in their country of origin, they are likely to be affected by legislation on taxation or social security to some degree (Himmelroos and Peltoniemi 2021). Our findings suggest that non-residents spontaneously apply such all-affected principles (Dahl 1970, see also Näsström, 2011) by being mobilised by concrete ties that connect them to homeland politics.…”

“…In response to a globally dispersed electorate, many countries have granted their non-resident citizens the right to vote in national elections over the past decades. In recent years, political participation of non-resident voters has been further facilitated by introducing various forms of convenience voting, such as early, postal or proxy voting, and special emigrant representatives elected from overseas electoral districts (Himmelroos and Peltoniemi 2021;Hutcheson and Arrighi 2015;Schmid et al 2019).…”

“…Previous empirical research has, in turn, focused on determinants of support for emigrant voting rights (e.g. Collyer 2013;Himmelroos and Peltoniemi 2021;Lafleur 2011;Stutzer and Slotwinski 2021;Turcu and Urbatsch 2020;Wellman 2021), policy issues related to electoral incentives (e.g. Nemčok and Peltoniemi 2021;Wass, Peltoniemi, Weide, and Nemčok, 2021;Østergaard-Nielsen and Ciornei 2019) and allowing emigrants to elect special emigrant representatives (e.g.…”

The mobilizing effects of political media consumption among external voters

“…Budria et al 2017) and double citizenship (e.g. Himmelroos and Peltoniemi 2021). We further include a control for friends in the country of origin and for Finnish language skills since this might impact the extent to which our respondents of Swedish-speaking origin are able to follow the election campaign, where many debates and events are carried out in Finnish.…”