Overseas Voting Participation Beyond Borders by Bailey Kathryn Sanders

Overseas Voting Participation Beyond Borders by Bailey Kathryn Sanders (Under the Direction of James Monogan ) Abstract Throughout the 20th century a growing number of states have taken proactive steps to ensure the political participation of their citizens residing abroad, even those citizens that have no intention of returning to the home state. I argue that to fully understand the rise of overseas voting we must consider it as a two stage process, one that is driven both by international norms of democratic participation and more state specific historical and political factors. I analyze the adoption of overseas voting in 73 countries from 1962 to 2013 in Europe and Latin America. I find that, though scholars often reference international remittances as a major reason for extending the overseas vote, state GDP, the timing of independence, and the number of educated emigrants abroad play more important roles in the rapid extension of overseas voting throughout the 20th century. Index words: Overseas voting, democratic norms, sociopolitical factors, policy diffusion approach Overseas Voting Participation Beyond Borders by Bailey Kathryn Sanders B.A., University of Alabama, 2010 A Masters Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Athens, Georgia 2013 c 2013 Bailey Kathryn Sanders All Rights Reserved Overseas Voting Participation Across Borders by Bailey Kathryn Sanders Approved: Major Professor: James Monogan Committee: Ryan Bakker Darius Ornston Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2013 Overseas Voting Participation Beyond Borders Bailey Kathryn Sanders Contents I Introduction . 1 II External Voting in the 20th Century . 3 III Approaches Towards External Voting . 8 I International Normative Change . 8 II Sociopolitical Approach . 19 IV A Policy Diffusion Approach . 25 V Methodological Overview . 29 VI Results . 32 VII Discussion . 34 VIII Conclusion . 38 Bibliography . 40 List of Figures 1 States with Overseas Voting throughout the World. Blue shading indicates overseas voting. 4 2 Percent of Electoral Democracies with the Overseas Vote . 5 3 Adoption of Overseas Voting by Regions . 6 4 Adoption of Female and Overseas Suffrage . 13 5 States Adopting Overseas Voting before 1990 . 26 6 States Adopting Overseas Voting after 1990 . 26 7 Baseline Hazard Rate . 34 8 Hazard Rate by Independence .......................... 34 9 Hazard Rate by Emigration Rate ........................ 35 List of Tables 1 States participating in the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers. Stars indicate states without overseas voting. 10 2 1930 League of Nations Convention on Nationality Laws. Stars indicate states without overseas voting. 17 3 Latin American States: Dual Nationality/Overseas Voting . 18 4 Top Remittance Receiving Countries in 2010. Stars indicate states without overseas voting. 23 5 Examples of Temporal Clusters of Overseas Voting . 27 6 Overseas Voting Adoption 1962-2013, Mixed Effect Cox Model with Country Frailties . 33 I Introduction Historically, the majority of states never explicitly disenfranchised citizens who chose to live abroad. Instead, government officials neglected to set up institutional pathways that allowed citizens to exercise their voting rights while overseas. Between 1962 and 2013, however, 97 countries throughout the world took steps to create the necessary institutional frameworks to allow overseas citizens to vote from outside the national territory.1 Some states, in fact, began to allow their overseas citizens to elect their own representatives to the national legislature (France, Italy, Croatia, Portugal, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Algeria). This widespread decision to expand suffrage represents an unprecedented electoral reform, one that marks a shift in our understanding of who has the right to participate in domestic elections in a world that is increasingly characterized by international migration.2 Surprisingly, this suffrage expansion has gained little attention outside of a small subset of scholars, many of whom stem from sociology rather than political science. The majority of works examining voting from abroad have been case studies, and those few studies that attempt to examine more than two or three countries typically focus on one region of the world (Itzigsohn 2000; Chelius 2003; Escobar 2007). The studies that have attempted to quantitatively examine the causes behind the growth of overseas voting in the 20th century (Collyer and Vathi 2007; Rhodes and Harutyunyan 2010), while informative, do not account for the real possibility that overseas voting, as a new institutional practice that spread across the globe in a relatively short time period, might well be a temporally and spatially 1In the first half of the 20th century, a few states (Australia, Canada, France, U.S.) began to allow their military and civil service personnel to vote while serving overseas, but regular civilians were not included in this effort to ensure participation. 2Some scholars use a particularly expansive definition of overseas voting, one that includes countries which require citizens to travel back to the home state to vote or countries in which only certain classes of citizens may vote abroad. For example, Turkey requires emigrants to return to embassies or checkpoints on the border to vote while Ireland only permits government personnel to vote abroad. I am interested in the practice of allowing all citizens to vote from outside the national territory. I include a list of the countries I define as offering the overseas vote, as well as those that are sometimes included by others scholars, in the appendix. 1 dependent process. Thus, there is yet to be a comprehensive, theoretically driven explanation for why the majority of electoral democracies have now taken proactive measures to ensure the political participation of their overseas citizens. I argue that the rise of overseas voting can best be understood as a two-stage process. The first stage consists of the growing change in international standards concerning proper democratic behavior, particularly new understandings of \who" has a right to participate in the political process. The second, and more powerful stage, is specific to individual states' historical and domestic situations. States operate within the international, normative environment, but are still sovereign entities that will introduce new institutions only when it is advantageous to do so. Using data from 1962 to 2013, I empirically examine the process of suffrage expansion to the overseas electorates of Western Europe and Latin America. I test a number of commonly proposed reasons for the appearance of overseas voting, including level of democratization, economic dependence on international remittances, the size of the emigrant population, and the timing of independence.3 I find that wealthier countries and those that gained independence post 1970 are more likely to have adopted overseas voting, while countries with higher levels of educated emigrants are less likely to institutionalize overseas voting, a finding that contradicts much of the literature. This suggests that states are willing to enfranchise overseas citizens when the \threat" of their participation is low; states may be more willing to enfranchise a diaspora made up of uneducated migrant workers who are unlikely to come to the polls in large num- bers, but be less inclined to enfranchise a diaspora that is characterized by highly educated 3Importantly, unlike previous works on overseas voting, I distinguish between those countries which allow all citizens to vote from outside the national territory and those that only permit certain classes of citizens (typically soldiers, government personnel, or students). Though much of the literature places the first instance of overseas voting in 1902 (New Zealand, for a very small subset of the population), the practical implementation of overseas voting for a wide class of citizens is very much a recent phenomenon. Allowing military personnel or civil service members to participate in elections abroad is not a particularly interesting institutional choice, and is also one that is much less expensive and less controversial than extending suffrage to all overseas citizens. 2 individuals who are likely to turn out on election day. The potential for the overseas vote, if properly mobilized, to swing an election can be seen as damaging the legitimacy of domestic elections. This is an important finding, because it suggests that the type of emigrant population a state is faced with may play a role in officials’ decision to enfranchise emigrants, and that overseas voting may have become so prevalent because most states are not faced with highly educated and politically active diasporas (and therefore have less to fear, in terms of electoral consequences, from enfranchising overseas citizens). This article is organized as follows. First, I examine the rise of overseas voting during the 20th century, noting both regional and temporal patterns. I then explore the two stages of the rise of overseas voting, paying attention to both the normative and sociopolitical factors driving this suffrage extension. Next, I explain why a diffusion approach is the most appropriate framework for examining the growth of overseas voting from a quantitative perspective. The remaining sections present model specifics and results. I conclude the

Load more