Migrant voting: here, there, in both countries, or nowhere

Citizenship Studies, vol. 24, pp. 730–750

Abstract

Moving past the literature on states granting migrant voting rights, in this article I focus on individuals exercising rights in order to question the connections between (non)citizenship, political membership, and participation in contemporary societies. With over 120 countries worldwide having enfranchised migrants in some form, the binary of ‘here’ and ‘there’ is insufficient to categorize and study migrant political engagement. This article contains a new typology to classify the four options of migrant voting: immigrant (only in the destination country), emigrant (only in the origin country), dual transnational (in both), and abstention (in neither). While emigrant voting requires citizenship, immigrant noncitizen voting does not, so active noncitizen voting weakens the defining dimensions of citizenship as a concept. As a first application, I analyze differences between individuals pertaining to each of the four types, based on a 2017 survey of 680 migrants in Chile since this country grants extensive migrant suffrage rights.

Authors 1

1. Victoria Finn corresponding Aachen Department of Political Science Department of Humanities, Leiden University

   Leiden University · Universidad Diego Portales

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Political Science, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile & Department of Humanities, Leiden University, The Netherlands