Passed, regulated, or applied? The different stages of emigrant enfranchisement in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

When are emigrants really enfranchised? Lengthy lags exist between some reforms that de jure introduced external voting and their application. In the blooming literature on emigrant enfranchisement, these lags remain unexplained. We argue that this hampers our understanding of enfranchisement processes as having different legal and political stages. With data on Latin American and Caribbean states since 1965 until the present, we investigate why some states in this region have delayed the regulation and application of external franchise while others have implemented it right after enactment. We propose hypotheses to understand these reforms as episodes marked by different contexts, engineered by different agent coalitions and embedded into larger processes of political change. In particular, we suggest that enfranchisement processes are composed of three stages: enactment, regulation, and first application. Our findings suggest that the process of adoption of external voting is shaped by the legal mechanism of enactment and the stability of political coalitions.

Political Regimes and External Voting Rights: A Cross-National Comparison

“…The same holds true in Middle Eastern and North African countries as well as Sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Lafleur, 2015;Wellman, 2020). Overall, holding multiparty elections is a strong determinant for enacting and implementing emigrant enfranchisement in the Global South (Escobar, 2015;Palop-García and Pedroza, 2019;Wellman, 2020).…”

“…Overall, most countries classified as autocracies display a negative outcome or '0', when referring to implementing external voting rights, regardless of whether they had previously passed a provision to enfranchise their nonresident citizens. Certain countries, such as Angola and Nicaragua, promulgated provisions to organize external voting decades ago, but have not implemented corresponding legislation (Ellis et al, 2007;Palop-García and Pedroza, 2019).…”

“…Similar to recent relevant contributions (e.g., Lafleur, 2013;Palop-García and Pedroza, 2019;Wellman, 2020), we operationalized emigrant enfranchisement as a two-stage process. The first involves enacting external voting rights, or de jure emigrant enfranchisement.…”

“…Considering the association between democratic norms and countries that have adopted and implemented external voting rights, scholars have further indicated the relevant role of democratization (e.g., Lafleur, 2015;Palop-García and Pedroza, 2019). Using the window-of-opportunity hypothesis, Rhodes and Harutyunyan (2010) correlate whether periods of democratic transitions establish a unique opportunity for creating several policies, such as dual citizenship and external voting.…”

“…Existing literature has produced various explanations associating democratization, democratic endurance, and norm diffusion to external voting rights. First, the window-of-opportunity hypothesis-which refers to the crucial moment when countries democratize and, shortly thereafter, when they typically revamp their legal framework-is a plausible answer for why states enact, regulate, and apply such a provision of external voting rights (Rhodes and Harutyunyan, 2010;Lafleur, 2015;Palop-García and Pedroza, 2019). Second, democratic norms as waves of emulation and diffusion appear to significantly correlate to emigrant enfranchisement.…”