Voting from abroad is broadly conceptualized as a set of procedures that enable nonresident citizens (emigrants) to partake in home-country elections and possibly stand as candidates (Nohlen and Grotz, 2000; Lafleur, 2013; Collyer, 2014a). It is a common practice globally, with more than 130 autonomous territories having promulgated emigrant enfranchisement (Allen et al., 2019). However, some democracies are still reluctant to grant electoral rights to their nonresident populations, whereas some autocracies bestow generous provisions to their emigrants that politically incorporate them in the demos. Considering the long-standing scholarly debate on democratization and democratic endurance from the mid-twentieth century to the present, we ask: to what extent does democracy predict the timing of the adoption and implementation of emigrant enfranchisement? If it is a main driver, what explains the deviant cases? In other words, why are some liberal democracies, such as Ireland and Uruguay, hesitant to enfranchise emigrants, while some electoral autocracies like Turkey and Venezuela still grant electoral rights to nonresident populations?

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. This is because globalization, along with technology and communication, has facilitated disseminating policies and practices around the world. Ease of communication allows neighboring countries to exchange information regarding their institutional experiments on external voting rights and on other migrant political transnational practices, such as dual citizenship (Turcu and Urbatsch, 2015). Third, political competition plays an increasingly important role in enfranchisement discussions. This might not only be explained by the fact that external voting can swing electoral results, but also because political competition may cause the incumbent and/or opposition parties to make electoral reforms and regulate external voting (Brand, 2010; Gamlen, 2015; Turcu and Urbatsch, 2020a; Wellman, 2020).

Considering previous academic appraisals, our theoretical argument supports the hypothesis that countries classified as democracies are more likely to adopt and implement external voting rights, as compared to autocracies. We disaggregated this nexus using a four-value variable of political regime and reporting that liberal and electoral democracy, as well as electoral autocracy, have a positive impact on emigrant enfranchisement, compared to closed autocracy. We also examine why some democracies withhold external voting rights, while some autocracies extend them, for various strategic state-level motivations. Refining the theoretical argument of Brand (2010) on autocracies, there are at least two reasons: 1) the countries enacted external voting rights when they had previously been democratic and currently prefer to generate more constraints to voting rather than reversing existing policies, and/or 2) they merely use external voting for their own benefit. For democracies that still fail to enact emigrant enfranchisement, external voting rights are a contested issue for homeland politicians, since they believe that emigrants’ preferences can flip electoral results, either against them or in their favor.

Employing a regression-based nested analysis (Rohlfing, 2008), in which we combine a large-N analysis with a carefully selected set of case studies, we first evaluate whether democracy is a significant driver to emigrant enfranchisement and then attempt to determine why and how deviant cases behave differently. First, to examine if emigrant enfranchisement is associated with democratic regimes, we use a global longitudinal dataset (1896–2019) with countries that either have, or do not have, external voting provisions as of 2020. Then, we dive deeper into four deviant cases (Ireland, Uruguay, Turkey, and Venezuela) to elucidate mesolevel mechanisms and state-led motivations for explaining their rationale of either granting or withholding external voting rights. Our conceptualization of external voting rights entails a clear-cut electoral eligibility of civilians and the rights of casting the vote from abroad. It thus excludes countries that only allow diplomatic and military personnel and/or nonresident citizens who travel during election day to their origin country, whether subsidized by the political elite (i.e., political parties and leaders) or willingly, to participate in homeland elections.

This article is structured as follows. First, we briefly discuss the relation between political regimes and emigrant enfranchisement. Second, we broadly compare emigrant enfranchisement in democratic vs. authoritarian regimes. Third, we unpack the mechanisms in four outliers—two democracies and two autocracies with counterintuitive outcomes—to examine how and why they have adopted and implemented external voting rights or decided to withhold such rights.

Despite most scholarly discussions on full political rights having traditionally linked them to democratic polity (e.g., López-Guerra, 2005; Bauböck, 2015; Altman, 2020), emigrant enfranchisement is also present in authoritarian regimes (Østergaard-Nielsen, 2003; Brand, 2010; Collyer, 2014b). Empirical evidence suggests a probabilistic, rather than deterministic, logic that assumes democracies depict high levels of inclusion, whereas autocracies do not.

Relying on seminal contributions of democratic theory (e.g., Dahl, 1971; Dahl, 2008; Coppedge, 2012), such a puzzle can be explained by the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a democracy or autocracy. Political regimes can be classified by their levels of competition (or contestation) and participation (or inclusion) (Dahl, 1971). Whereas contestation refers to the procedures of political competition in free and fair elections, participation is mainly concerned with who partakes in the democratic decision-making process. Not every autocracy displays low inclusion, but, normatively, democracies should depict high degrees of both participation and competition (Clark et al., 2017).

Based on these scope conditions, four different types of political regimes can be classified: liberal democracy, electoral democracy, electoral autocracy, and closed autocracy (Lührmann et al., 2018). Liberal democracy is the regime most akin to Dahl’s polyarchy, in which the rule of law and liberal principles are satisfied and the degrees of participation and competition are high. Electoral democracy displays high levels of inclusion and contestation but lacks some aspects of the rule of law and liberal principles. In an electoral autocracy, there is only one effective party, or the field of political competition is uneven despite de jure multiparty elections. Lastly, closed autocracies comprise all political regimes where neither de jure nor de facto competitive elections occur. Political inclusion can be high even in these cases, yet closed autocracies systematically violate liberal principles and rule of law (Lührmann et al., 2018), likely alongside also violating the political and civil rights of nonresident citizens.

Figure 1 shows a four-category relation between nonresident citizens’ electoral inclusion and political regimes. It illustrates the different types of political regimes in circles and three lines indicating the following: (A) transitioning from one regime to another; (B) the window-of-opportunity hypothesis; and (C) the assumption that the odds of electoral inclusion for nonresident citizens is more likely to occur in a liberal democracy than in a closed autocracy.

Relying on the existing literature of regime transition and consolidation (e.g., Linz and Stepan, 1996; Bratton and Van de Walle, 1997), the continuum between democracy and authoritarianism may present different instances for emigrant enfranchisement. Preceding studies about the relation between democratization and external voting rights have been largely interested in a unidirectional conjecture (represented as a dashed line in Figure 1). As the window-of-opportunity hypothesis suggests, democratization is conducive to enlarging citizenship rights (Ramirez et al., 1997). It assumes that nonresident citizens—analogous to other historically marginalized collectives (e.g., women and ethnic minorities) excluded from franchise—may profit from a democratization process (Foweraker and Landman, 1999; Lafleur, 2015). Drawing on this assumption, Rhodes and Harutyunyan (2010) hypothesize that political competition encourages countries to enact external voting rights since it enables more actors to impact the policy-making process. In that sense, nonresident citizens’ demands for voting rights are more prone to be heard in the domestic realm and supported by homeland political parties willing to capture overseas votes (Gamlen, 2015; Østergaard-Nielsen et al., 2019; Burgess, 2020).

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. Although they found no significance in their quantitative assessment regarding the extension of emigrant enfranchisement, they highlight that democratic transitions are key in explaining the extension of citizenship regimes to nonresident citizens.

The window-of-opportunity hypothesis was particularly relevant in the Global South at the beginning of the third wave of democratization. In Latin America, various authors suggest that the quality of democratic institutions affected enfranchisement processes, including extending suffrage rights to migrants (e.g., Escobar, 2015; Finn, 2020). 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).

Moreover, comparative political and international relations’ studies have examined the democratic norms’ hypothesis since the seminal work of Huntington (1991) on the third wave of democratization. International and regional norms’ diffusion occurs when states replicate other governments’ decision-making (Elkins and Simmons, 2005). This hypothesis is likely to spread across borders, such as through waves of emulation and diffusion (Turcu and Urbatsch, 2015). Neighboring countries are the main responsible actors in emulating such norms, given their fairly high and mutual information flows (Kopstein and Reilly, 2000). When country A has experimented with innovative policies that function well, neighboring country B may actively promulgate similar policies to resolve domestic challenges (Cortell and Davis, 1996; Gleditsch and Ward, 2006). States must have a ‘good’ or ‘positive’ perception of the countries they mimic, particularly when the policies have not been conclusively proven before. As such, this hypothesis works as a social process within adjacent geographic locations over time (Brinks and Coppedge, 2006; Turcu and Urbatsch, 2015).

Alongside this neighboring diffusion effect, scholars have also emphasized the role of nonresident nationals and noncitizen residents as agents of democratic norms diffusion (Pérez-Armendariz and Crow, 2010; Turcu and Urbatsch, 2015). Experiences of Latin American emigrants in the United States, for instance, suggest that enactment and implementation occurred from origin countries not only due to encouragement of their political elite, but also bottom-up demand for dual citizenship and external voting rights (Jones-Correa, 1998; Lafleur, 2013). As such, emigrants themselves became agents of democratization (Escobar, 2017).

Likewise, extending external voting rights to nonresident populations also lies within existing literature on electoral preferences, particularly the burgeoning literature on the voting alignment of citizens residing abroad (e.g., Verdery, 1998; Turcu and Urbatsch, 2020a). A growing number of contributions have explained the increasing interest of ruling parties and coalitions in enfranchising nonresident citizens—again, similar to their interest in other excluded minority groups throughout history—given their strategic calculations (e.g., Østergaard-Nielsen et al., 2019; Umpierrez de Reguero and Dandoy, 2020; Wellman, 2020). This logic relies largely on two theoretical arguments: 1) electoral reform will only occur if ruling parties or a coalition is willing to incorporate new actors into the political game (Boix, 1999) or 2) as a coercion tactic in which incumbent parties or coalitions seek to deter potential challengers from opposition parties (Geddes, 2005; Magaloni, 2006; Simpser, 2013). While the first argument most likely relates to a democratic context, the second is inherently associated with the de facto hegemonic nature of party systems (Wellman, 2020). By assuming that incumbent parties or coalitions will grant suffrage rights to nonresident citizens, these arguments lead homeland politicians to pursue a new niche of potential voters to support them.

So, which political parties support external voting rights and why? In Latin America, emigrants’ political rights were mostly promoted by right-leaning parties, under the influence of ‘strongmen’ in power prior to the 1990s (Escobar, 2015). Yet, the ascension of outsiders into politics—e.g., Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), and Evo Morales (Bolivia), as well as being associated with an inclusionary radical populism—has been accompanied by the adoption and implementation of external voting provisions that lean toward left-wing actors (Bermúdez et al., 2017; Erlingsson and Tuman, 2017; Umpierrez de Reguero et al., 2020). In Sub-Saharan Africa, the opposition parties, probably driven by a rational-choice estimation, often support emigrant enfranchisement given the aversion that incumbent parties can generate from the diaspora related to “domestic discontent, lack of opportunities, and conflicts” (Wellman, 2020, p. 3). In Europe, external voting rights are often correlated with mainstream right-wing parties (Østergaard-Nielsen et al., 2019). For example, in Italy, the National Alliance is associated with the evolution of emigrant enfranchisement and paying attention to emigrants’ wellbeing (Lafleur, 2013). In France and Spain, citizenship reforms, in particular the rights of nonresident citizens, have been endorsed by mainstream right-leaning parties (Joppke, 2003).

Beyond the left-right axis of party politics, it seems that nonresident citizens are more prone to vote for green parties as compared to domestic voters (Turcu and Urbatsch, 2020b). Overall, many homeland parties are highly interested in campaigning across borders (Paarlberg, 2017; Østergaard-Nielsen and Ciornei, 2019; Burgess, 2020; Jakobson et al., 2020; Kernalegenn and Van Haute, 2020; Rashkova, 2020; Camatarri, 2021; Umpierrez de Reguero and Dandoy, 2021). As effective political competition is a substantial aspect for detecting a mutually exclusive classification between democracy and authoritarianism, we pose a fruitful debate of party politics in Small-N: Unpacking the Political Regime-Emigrant Enfranchisement Relation to answer how and why some political regimes present counterintuitive results on emigrant enfranchisement.

In order to answer if democracies or autocracies are more likely to enfranchise nonresident citizens, we constructed a cross-national dataset, which includes information for 158 countries from 1896 to 2019 (N = 16,289). In other words, our unit of analysis is country year. In our dataset, Norway was the first country to enact external voting rights for some civilians (i.e., not only for diplomatic and military personnel) in 1896 (Saby, 1918), so we take this year as the starting point in our assessment. If a country was established later than this time, we adhere observations to our dataset the same year they obtained formal recognition as a sovereign territory, as recognized by most states and international organizations. For instance, we incorporated Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovakia in 1992 and 1993, respectively. Given the complex search for accurate emigrant electoral rights in some contexts (e.g., authoritarian regimes and when the documents verifying the emigrant enfranchisement stages are not publicly available), our sample numbers 158 origin countries (see Supplementary Table S1).

Our dataset relies on primary and secondary sources. We corroborated each observation on the enactment and first application of emigrant enfranchisement from online archives and existing official documents from electoral commissions and ministries of interior about electoral processes abroad. We also gathered dataset observations by consulting reputable indexes such as the Regimes of the World (RoW), the measure from the Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM, Coppedge et al., 2020) project, and the Electoral Laws Indicators (ELECLAW) from the Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT, Schmidt et al., 2019). In addition, we consulted supplementary data in academic references (e.g., Escobar, 2017; Østergaard-Nielsen et al., 2019; Wellman, 2020) to enrich our dataset.

In this section, we aim to shed light on how different mesolevel mechanisms and state-led motivations help explain why some political regimes are deviant cases for the above-indicated results. We dive into the strategic role of political elites that lie behind country-case outliers. We use most-different cases since “most different cases that are broadly representative of the population will provide the strongest basis for generalization” (Seawright and Gerring, 2008, p. 298). On one side, we briefly analyze the current debates on emigrant enfranchisement of Ireland and Uruguay (both democracies) and specifically why they fail to enact and/or implement a provision for granting suffrage rights to nonresident citizens. On the other side, we examine de jure and de facto emigrant enfranchisement in Turkey and Venezuela, two electoral autocracies. Although closed autocracies can also enact and/or implement external voting rights, we focus on electoral autocracies due to their higher probability to do so (see Findings; Supplementary Table S3). Emigrant enfranchisement has already been intensively explored in closed autocracies, such as in Algeria and Morocco (see Brand, 2010).

Being outliers of the nexus between political regime and external voting rights, Ireland, Uruguay, Turkey, and Venezuela provide us diversity in terms of political context, economic development, and culture. For decades, Ireland and Turkey have ranked among the top twenty of the highest migration outflows worldwide (Abadan-Unat, 2011; Honohan, 2011). Currently, Venezuela is the biggest sending country in South America (Acosta et al., 2019). Meanwhile, Uruguay has a significant share of its population abroad (Margheritis, 2017; Altman, 2020). Therefore, the four country cases allow us to unpack mechanisms for their counterintuitive behavior (see Table 2)—namely, to explain their deviant outcomes.

In this article, we examined the relation between political regimes and external voting rights. Our dependent variables comprised de jure and de facto emigrant enfranchisement, while our main explanatory factor was structured from a four-value variable of political regimes: liberal and electoral democracies as well as electoral and closed autocracies. First, we ran a set of Cox Hazard Proportional models, which contributed to identifying whether democracy is a driver of emigrant enfranchisement. Second, using most-different cases, we unpacked how and why the deviant country cases of Ireland, Uruguay, Turkey, and Venezuela behave differently than expected. We delved into state-led motivations and mesolevel mechanisms that lie behind these country outliers. For the first component, we used a global longitudinal dataset, whereas for the second we conducted and analyzed interviews, official documents, and secondary sources.

Our findings report a positive correlation between democracy and external voting rights: higher levels of inclusion and party competition mean higher probabilities of adopting and implementing the voting franchise for nonresident citizens. The deviant liberal democracies under study, Ireland and Uruguay, demonstrated that in certain contexts with a relatively large diaspora size, and where part of the political spectrum is doubtful about nonresident citizens’ political orientations, states may deem it better not to grant de jure or de facto emigrant enfranchisement. Political elites, even resident nationals, feel no need to change the status quo and thus continue withholding nonresident citizen voting. The electoral autocracies under analysis, Turkey and Venezuela, showed that once external voting rights are enacted, states considered it more ideal to calibrate the intensity and leverage of this suffrage, depending on the benefits that the incumbents could gain from nonresident citizens. When the diaspora favors (or is perceived to favor) the incumbency, then external voting rights are extended; otherwise, they are restricted or limited for nonresident citizens.

We encourage scholars interested in the relation between emigrant enfranchisement and political regimes to expand systematic comparisons over time. One case study of interest, Croatia, could hold another mechanism overlooked in this article. Croatia was an electoral autocracy when it granted emigrant enfranchisement but is now a liberal democracy, possibly offering further refinement to the window-of-opportunity hypothesis. Scholars also need to increase the dialogue between those involved in exploring authoritarianization and external voting rights and those interested in the window-of-opportunity and norms diffusion hypotheses, to explain how and why states enfranchise nonresident citizens. Moreover, we invite scholars and practitioners to replicate or refine our theoretical appraisal in other autocracies, such as Angola and Nicaragua, that enacted provisions for emigrant enfranchisement but have failed to regulate and apply them.

Looking to electoral autocracies that still implement external voting rights, disenfranchisement would be a contrasting scenario for future research. As the regime transition from democracy to autocracy is a reality in some country cases such as Venezuela, there is an opportunity to delineate future guidelines for scholars interested in authoritarian endurance and disenfranchisement processes.