Overseas Voting Participation Beyond Borders by Bailey Kathryn Sanders

Home , 2013 in Europe

Overseas Voting Participation Beyond Borders

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

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

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 numbers, 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 paper with a discussion of my findings.

II External Voting in the 20th Century

Currently, at least 97 countries permit their citizens to vote from abroad. Sixty nine of these countries are classiﬁed as electoral democracies, while the remaining 28 represent varying shades of democratic governance.4 Figure 1 provides an overview of these countries, and clearly demonstrates that though Europe accounts for 37 of the 97 countries, this new institution is present in every region of the globe. In Figure 2, I outline the world pattern of acquisition of the franchise for overseas citizens and plot cumulative percentages of countries in which overseas citizens were given the option of voting abroad from the 1960s to 2013.

4Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Honduras, Venezuela, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Laos, Singapore, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Mozam- bique, Rwanda, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Tajikistan

3 Figure 1: States with Overseas Voting throughout the World. Blue shading indicates overseas voting.

In 1980, 20% of existing electoral democracies had made the decision to allow overseas voting. By 1995, that percentage had doubled. This is most certainly partly due to the fact that a number of new countries, upon independence, included provisions for overseas voting in their new constitutions in the years 1991-1994.5 This “window of opportunity” for institutionalizing more inclusive voting processes after a democratic transition was earlier noted by Ramirez, Soysal and Shanahan (1997) in their examination of female suffrage. The authors found that “over time, independence and the enactment of suffrage for both men and women (universal suffrage) became not a string of disparate events, but a single political event” (Ramirez, Soysal and Shanahan 1997, 741). In the latter half of the 20th century, overseas voting seems to have been incorporated into this inclusive process.

5When calculating the cumulative percentage of democracies with overseas voting I do account for the growing number of electoral democracies. I use the Freedom House count of electoral democracies from the years 1989-2011, and thus am able to account for the increase (and at times, decrease) in the number of electoral democracies over time. For the years 1960-1989, I assume a total of 69 electoral democracies in the world.

4 Figure 2: Percent of Electoral Democracies with the Overseas Vote

100

25 Percentage of States with Overseas Voting of States with Overseas Percentage 0

1960 1980 2000 Year

It was not only newly independent countries, however, that contributed to the growing percentage of electoral democracies adopting this wider definition of political citizenship. The U.S., for example, granted overseas citizens voting rights (though military and civil personnel had the ability since 1944) in 1975; this was after a campaign by motivated emigrants to send tea bags to Members of Congress in reference to the Boston Tea Party (Bauböck 2005, 684). Britain, similarly, did not allow British citizens residing out of the country to vote until pressure from emigrant citizens lead to the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1985. If we look at the adoption of overseas voting from a regional perspective (see Figure 3), it is clear that Europe has been the leader in extending the franchise past territorial borders. Eighty-two percent of European states now permit external voting. EU member states account for a considerable proportion of these states; except for Greece, all member states permit their citizens to vote from outside the national territory (though some, like the United Kingdom, restrict such voting rights after a specified number of years abroad).

5 Figure 3: Adoption of Overseas Voting by Regions

Asia and Pacific 60 Central and Eastern Europe

40 Latin America

Middle East and Africa 20 Western Europe Percentage of States Percentage

0 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 Year

Latin America (including Canada and the U.S.) represents the region with the second largest number of states permitting the overseas vote, though moves to enfranchise overseas citizens, for the most part, began much later than in Europe. In 1995, less than 25% of countries in this region had created the necessary pathways to allow overseas suffrage while more than 50% of European states had done so. Looking at both Africa and Asia together, it is evident that overseas suffrage has made less headway in these two regions, a trend that is fairly unsurprising given that these regions are less democratic overall. For instance, though Iraq holds elections, it is not necessarily the image of a stable democracy, nor should one be surprised that Saudi Arabia, which has yet to permit women to vote, does not offer overseas voting.6 Clearly, though overseas voting (for all citizens) did not arise until the mid 20th century, it seems to be making steady progress towards becoming what could almost be called an institutional norm for today’s electoral democracies. The question is, why did the majority of democracies (as well as a number of less democratic states) decide to extend suffrage past

6Kenyan citizens were granted the right to vote abroad in the new constitution of 2010 but, presently, have not been permitted to do so because the laws to determine how the overseas votes will be incorporated and counted have yet to be decided on.

6 territorial borders? There are certainly a number of reasons states would not want to do so. The most obvious reason is that overseas citizens, precisely because they live outside of the national territory and therefore live outside of the state’s control, are not affected by state law in the same manner as citizens living inside the nation. Dahl (2000) argues that “laws cannot rightfully be imposed on others by persons who are not themselves obliged to obey the laws,” while López-Guerra (2005) strongly asserts that, “if we accept that long- term residency in a democratic state is what should entitle people to full political rights,” regardless of ethnicity, race or sex, “then we must also endorse the idea that permanent non-residents should be disenfranchised (Dahl 2000, 81; Lopez-Guerra 2005, 217) Even if one instead (as the majority of countries seemingly do with regards to expatriates) chooses to base voting rights on the principle of affected interest, wherein the right to be included in the voting process depends on “one’s having an interest that can be expected to be affected by the particular collective action in question,” enabling overseas voting presents quandaries concerning economic cost, proper vote allocation, and even possibilities of electoral manipulation (Shapiro 1999, 38). The institutional framework for allowing and enabling overseas voting is always more costly than in-country voting (in the 2004 Australian elections, the average cost of voting per elector inside the country was 5.29 AUD while for voters residing outside the country the cost was 19.21 AUD), while the rules determining how overseas votes are distributed to in-state districts can become overly complex and subject to party maneuvering (Ellis 2007). The 2000 U.S. presidential election witnessed accusations that elections officials at the state level used different standards to account for overseas votes, while in the 2004 presidential election in Ukraine there were numerous reports of persons voting multiple times by absentee ballots (Grace 2007, 35). Overseas voting, then, clearly has drawbacks for the states that choose to implement it. Such drawbacks seem not to have deterred the majority of electoral democracies from doing so, however, and this paper seeks to understand why.

7 III Approaches Towards External Voting

In the first book to be published on the subject of overseas voting, Lafleur (2013) writes that the adoption of overseas voting policies over the past few decades can be studied from three different perspectives: through a normative theory approach analyzing the legitimacy of overseas voting, through an examination of international norms concerning political rights, and through a sociopolitical approach that looks at state and emigrant characteristics that might influence decisions to extend the vote. This section explores these latter two approaches. Ultimately, I argue that external voting can best be studied by approaching the extension of suffrage as a new policy that is backed by both international norms regarding the political rights of citizens as well as state specific historical and political factors. Examining only the sociopolitical aspect of external voting, as Lafleur (2013) does in a number of in-depth case studies, does not allow us to account for the temporal and spatial aspects of overseas suffrage, while debating whether or not states should enfranchise overseas residents does not answer the question of why they do so. Only an analysis that takes into account both the normative and political pressures at work behind the adoption of overseas voting will allow us to craft a full understanding of the process.

I International Normative Change

In many discussions of external voting, scholars point towards the growing agreement between countries in the middle of the 20th century regarding the inalienable political and human rights of individuals as an important normative backdrop to countries’ decision to adopt overseas voting. Though citizenship has long been assumed to go hand in hand with political participation, this “privilege has historically been exclusionary by gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and class”(Bloemraad, Korteweg and Yurdakul 2008, 156). It has only been in the 20th century that we have seen the majority of states expand their conception

8 of political citizenship to include all citizens of the state. Numerous treaties, conventions, and internationals declarations have helped foster this new understanding of democratic participation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) asserts that

“everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives,” and that “all are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.”7

The 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in turn, declares that

“every citizen shall have the right and opportunity...to take part in the conduct of public aﬀairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives” and that “universal and equal suﬀrage” are rights derived from the “inherent dignity of the human person.”8

Declarations and conventions such as these, which have been mirrored at the regional level with the Charter of the Organization of American States and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, have contributed to a growing desire by states to demonstrate their commitment to free and fair elections. It is important to recognize, however, that none of these conventions or declarations address overseas voting. The only international convention to explicitly address such rights is the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers, and from an examination of Table 1, we can see that less than 50 countries have ratiﬁed it. Of those 50, 13 continue to refrain from allowing external voting. This highlights the fact that, though the evolving normative environment of the 20th century (with respect to citizens’ right to participate in free and fair elections) may be an important undercurrent to the rise of overseas voting, no nation has been pressured by

7http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ 8http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm

9 other state actors, or even international organizations, to adopt overseas voting. Overseas voting cannot be considered an international norm, in the strictest sense, because no country has ever suﬀered sanctions for refraining from allowing the overseas vote.

Table 1: States participating in the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers. Stars indicate states without overseas voting. Albania* Chile* Honduras Philippines Argentina Colombia Kyrgyzstan Senegal Algeria East Timor Lesotho* Seychelles* Azerbaijan Ecuador Libya* Sri Lanka* Bangladesh Egypt Mali Saint Vincent* Belize* El Salvador Mauritania Syria Bolivia Ghana Mexico Tajikistan Bosnia Guatemala* Morocco Turkey* Burkina Fasao* Guyana Nicaragua* Uganda* Cape Verde Guinea Peru Uruguay*

This holds true even when we turn to Europe, the region that has arguably made the most extensive and concrete advances towards expansive membership practices that transcend state boundaries. Though permitting overseas citizens to vote from abroad is viewed as a desirable practice within the EU, it is not mandatory. In 1979 the European Commission on Human Rights declared that preventing citizens from voting abroad was not discriminatory; more recently, in 2012 the European Court of Human Rights decided that Greece’s lack of external voting provisions was not a human rights violation (Laﬂeur 2013, 37). Thus, even within the EU’s rigorous and expansive standards of participation rights, external voting is not considered a requirement. Because of this, some scholars have argued that state level historical and domestic factors are the true causal factor behind the rise of external voting, and hence we have seen a number of admirable case studies seeking to explain the historical backdrop to a country’s decision to expand suﬀrage. While I agree that the decision to implement external voting is, in the end, an individual

10 state decision, I also argue that such decisions would not have been viewed as legitimate by domestic populations (and political parties) were it not for the more expansive democratic standards espoused by the international community in the mid twentieth century. Simply because states are not required to enfranchise overseas citizens does not prevent them from viewing such an action as appropriate and desirable. It is therefore important to situate the rise of external voting within the larger framework of normative change that occurred during the 20th century, speciﬁcally with respect to the overall extension of suﬀrage to previously excluded groups, the growing acceptance of external involvement in elections, and the growing sanctioning of transnational memberships.

Expanded Participation

The twentieth century has been a revolutionary time in terms of the expansion of suﬀrage. Between 1890 and 1994, women in 96 percent of all nation-states acquired the right to vote (Ramirez, Soysal and Shanahan 1997, 735). In countries where minorities had been previously restricted (or intimidated) from exercising voting rights, new understandings of equality and citizen rights resulted in an opening up of the political process and the entrance of more underprivileged groups into national legislatures (America being a prime example). Even the age at which individuals were considered eligible to vote underwent change during the 20th century; in 1960, almost every nation deﬁned the eligible voting age as 21. By 1999, nearly all nations had lowered that threshold to 18, and some even lower (Dalton and Gray 2003, 32). Although overseas voting has mostly gone unnoticed by the scholarly community, it should be recognized as one part of a larger attempt by democratic states (and emerging democratic states) to enable a more inclusive model of political citizenship in the 20th century. States began to view restrictions on voting as undesirable, or at least hard to justify within the normative environment pushed by the increasing number of human rights treaties,

11 conventions, and organizations. Suffrage extensions first appeared in only a few countries, countries who were pioneers for reasons of their own particular historical or domestic situations, but over time, more and more states chose to eliminate previous restrictions and open up the political process to almost all citizens.9 If we compare the cumulative percentages of states adopting female and overseas suffrage in the 20th century shown in Figure 4, for instance, we can see that though overseas suffrage began at a later date than female suffrage, and was picked up in a more gradual process, their trajectories are similar. By just focusing on Western Europe, the region in the world “where the rights of the individual citizen [were] developed earlier and more extensively,” we can see that the growth of female suffrage and overseas suffrage are very similar indeed. Overseas suffrage simply entered the scene later, a fact that is unsurprising given that overseas suffrage was not viewed as needful until large numbers of citizens began pursuing lives outside the national territory (and thus began to push for voting rights). As such, I posit that overseas voting is merely one of many policy changes that occurred during the latter half of the 20th century that were designed to open up the political arena to more voices. Indeed, Dalton and Gray (2003) found that there has been a widespread attempt by democracies across the globe to expand the electoral marketplace, both in the sense of providing more opportunities to voice opinions (creating more elected positions and holding elections more often) and by allowing more people the right to express those opinions (suffrage extensions). Overseas voting is merely one policy option among many with which states might experiment. This leads me to my first hypothesis:

• Hypothesis (Democracy): More democratic states, whose government actors are presumably more open towards (and concerned with) enhancing political participation, will be more likely to adopt overseas voting than less democratic states.

9(Katz 1997): “No country allows all adults to vote...Although the basic trend over the last 200 years has been to remove one barrier after another, many restrictions remain.” Convicted felons, for example, are typically prevented from voting.

12 Figure 4: Adoption of Female and Overseas Suﬀrage

100

Western European Vote

50 Electoral Democracies

Female Suffrage 25 Percentage of States Percentage

0 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 Year

External Involvement

Overseas voting should also be recognized as one aspect of a general move towards an acceptance of external involvement in elections. An important development over the past few decades has been the increasing trend for democratic states to invite election monitors to observe national elections. Despite the fact that states should be leery of allowing external actors to play a role in domestic elections (i.e, one of the strong arguments put forth against overseas voting), election monitoring has become a common practice in the democratic world. In 2004, 81.5% of elections occurred under the watchful eyes of international monitors, compared to just 10% in 1975 (Kelley 2008, 222).10 During the same years, the percentage of electoral democracies with overseas voting rose from less than 25% to more than 50%, representing a less dramatic, but equally important shift towards permitting external involvement in domestic elections. The general acceptance of election monitoring as a legitimate practice (indeed, a desirable

10Similar to the rise in overseas voting, part of the credit to this large jump in election monitoring rests with the fact that new democracies appeared at the end of the Cold War. “However, this does not explain why the current form of election monitoring should have been a response to democratizations. Furthermore, the pace of democratic transitions between the mid 1970s and 1980s compares favorably with that of the 1990s. Thus, if election monitoring was driven purely by a surge in transitions, then one may have expected election monitoring to spread during the late 1970s.” (Kelley 2008, 224)

13 one) has been viewed as a strong indicator of the perceived need for states to demonstrate their democratic credentials, particularly newly established democracies who have only recently began to allow for elections. As noted by Kelley (2008), political actors in these states see election monitoring as a tool to establish regime legitimacy, both from domestic and international perspectives. More specifically, Hyde (2011) argues that young democratic states use election monitoring as a “signal” to other states, a signal that governments believe necessary in order to receive “democracy-contingent” benefits and aid. States which fail to signal their democratic intentions will be less likely to receive material aid from more powerful Western states such as the U.S. While it seems unlikely that states might believe offering the overseas vote will result in aid from more established democracies, we should still recognize that the overseas vote can be construed as a democratic signal, but perhaps one intended for a narrower audience. Many of the states which have chosen to offer the overseas vote did so in conjunction with, or soon after, the transition to democracy. In particular, states who saw citizens flee during previously autocratic or repressive regimes made moves to reincorporate those individuals by ensuring their political rights. East Timor, Kosovo, and Iraq have all permitted such citizens to vote from outside the state, while the Central and Eastern European countries that gained independence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union have almost uniformly instituted overseas voting. While external involvement in domestic elections, be it from international organizations or even citizens of the state, would have been viewed as illegitimate and a violation of state sovereignty in earlier time periods, such involvement is now perceived as lending credence to state actors’ pursuit of free and fair elections. Election monitoring and overseas voting may be directed at slightly different audiences (foreign governments versus overseas citizens), but they should be viewed as stemming from the same normative shift regarding external involvement. For example, of the 53 states which hosted election monitors from the OSCE’s

14 Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) between 2008 and 2013, only nine (16%) do not also offer overseas voting. Furthermore, Czech citizens abroad were allowed to vote for the first time in the 2002 elections in part because of earlier recommendations made by the ODIHR after its observation of the 1998 elections. This supports Baubock’s (2006) observation that over time voting rights have come to be seen “not merely [as] negative liberties in the sense that government and other citizens have no right to interfere with an individual’s choice to exercise her franchise [but are instead] rights in the stronger sense of entitlements, which imply a correlative duty for governments to provide opportunities for exercising the right” (Baubock 2006, 2407).11 Instead of merely providing the option of voting to citizens, states are now expected to “go the extra mile” to demonstrate the transparency and expansiveness of the political process. New democratic states are particularly likely to be influenced by this new expectation, as it is such states which are in the most need of establishing strong democratic credentials. With this in mind, I hypothesize that:

• Hypothesis (Transition): States which have undergone transition recently, and are therefore attempting to establish democratic credentials, will be more likely to adopt overseas voting.

Transnational Memberships

A ﬁnal but equally important change that occurred during the 20th century is a shift from viewing immigrants as deserters or traitors to the state (for instance, the common characterization of Mexican emigrants in the early 20th century), and instead as citizens

11Of course, a number of democracies that invite election monitors end up cheating regardless, and some countries that implement overseas voting put copious bureaucratic red tape into the process in order to limit overall turnout, thus demonstrating that though states may want to appear more democratic, they do not always conform to normative ideals perfectly.

15 retaining important social and political claims on the state (Barry 2006; Baubock 2006).12 Barry (2006) argues that we have seen a broad “international trend toward rethinking citizenship,” a re-imagining that decouples citizenship and residence and allows for multiple memberships (Barry 2006, 17). This is demonstrated by the fact that the number of countries permitting dual citizenship has grown over the past couple decades, such that about half of all sovereign states in the world now tolerate, either through law or de facto acceptance, multiple nationalities (Goldstein and Piazza 1996; Faist 2001). This is almost an about-face from previous stances on dual or multiple nationality; the preamble of Hague Convention of 1930, for example, reads “All persons are entitled to one nationality, but one nationality only” (Faist 2001, 10). At that time, state governments were particularly concerned over the possibility of individuals voting within two national territories, an outcome that some viewed as a violation of the “one person, one vote” ideal of democracy. Yet, such worries have subsequently lessened over time. Of the 43 members states that attended the convention, only 7 continue to restrict dual nationality (Bolivia, China, Cuba, Iran, Liberia, Thailand, Venezuela). Similarly, only 10 of those states (Guatemala, Chile, Haiti, Liberia, China, Paraguay, Uruguay, Cuba, Greece, Nicaragua) do not yet allow for overseas voting. As we have seen with election monitoring and overseas voting, a large percentage of the states who have reformed their citizenship laws to allow for multiple nationalities have done so in the past two decades, indicating an ongoing shift in perceptions of overseas citizens as legitimate participants in national life (see Table 2). Thus, while in the early years of this century state governments viewed dual nationality as contradictory to state sovereignty and control (and perhaps undemocratic), today the notion of multiple memberships is a necessary (and practical) recognition of the increasing ﬂexibility of state borders. Overseas citizens are no longer considered “lost” to the state but

12U.S. women, for example, used to automatically lose their U.S. citizenship if they chose to marry a foreigner

16 Table 2: 1930 League of Nations Convention on Nationality Laws. Stars indicate states without overseas voting. Argentina Australia Belgium Bolivia* United Kingdom Canada Chile China* Colombia Cuba* Czechoslovakia Denmark El Salvador France Greece Guatemala Haiti Honduras India Italy Japan Liberia* Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Norway Panama Paraguay Iran* Peru Poland Portugal Romania Thailand(Siam)* Spain Sweden Switzerland South Africa Uruguay Venezuela*

instead remain legitimate members. The words of President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador, speaking in a presidential address in 2011, are a strong example of the shift in attitude toward emigrants and their right to be seen as community members: “I do not exaggerate when I say that the institutionalization of absentee voting is a historical necessity...we are not truly a democracy until the one-third of Salvadorans living outside the country have a voice in our elections.”13 Because overseas voting and dual nationality are policies stemming from the same conceptual shift, i.e that citizens who move abroad (even permanently) are still members of the national community, it makes sense to consider the possibility that these two policies go hand in hand more often than not. Thus, I hypothesize that:

• Hypothesis (Dual Citizenship): Countries which permit dual citizenship will be more likely to adopt overseas voting than countries which do not permit dual citizenship.

Overseas suﬀrage, election monitoring, and dual nationalities laws can be seen as unique but interconnected institutional responses to changing conceptions of proper democratic citizenship and political standards. The fact that all three of these new institutional practices 13“Absentee Voting Proposed in El Salvador’s National Elections”- September 16, 2011. Quarterly Amer- icas. http://www.americasquarterly.org/taxonomy/term/1750

17 Table 3: Latin American States: Dual Nationality/Overseas Voting Country Dual Citizenship Overseas Vote Bolivia 2004 2009 Brazil 1996 1989 Chile 2005 Colombia 1992 1962 Costa Rica 1995 2013 Dominican Rep 1994 1997 Ecuador 1995 2006 El Salvador 1983 2013 Guatemala 1999 Honduras 2003 2001 Mexico 1998 2006 Panama 1979 2007 Peru 1996 1980 Uruguay 1919 Venezuela 1999 1998

appeared during the latter half of the 20th century, and grew most rapidly in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, can be seen as an indicator that such moves stemmed from the same changing normative environment. However, as I noted earlier, no country has ever been sanctioned for refusing to allow overseas citizens to participate in elections. Political actors accept that there are numerous reasons why some governments would be extremely hesitant to do so, or even unable to do so, and as such allowing the overseas vote is seen as a democratic move that is desirable but not required. A shift in understandings concerning proper democratic participation standards allowed for state governments to view overseas suﬀrage as a legitimate and desirable practice, but one must recognize that “norms do not automatically change behavior” (Kelley 2008, 224). The following sections expand upon this assumption, and seek to explain why some state actors, working within this new normative environment, viewed overseas suﬀrage as worth implementing.

18 II Sociopolitical Approach

Allowing expatriates abroad to participate in domestic elections would have been unthinkable before the 20th century, as the accepted definition of democratic participation required that political participants live within the country. As I have demonstrated, it was the changing normative landscape of the 20th century which overturned previous conceptions and opened the way for overseas participation. One must recognize, however, that this normative framework only represents the first stage of the two stage growth of overseas voting, and that individual states’ own particular domestic situations (and historical precedents) potentially play a much larger and important role. State actors may view overseas suffrage as legitimate, but whether or not they will view it as desirable will depend upon party politics, economic motivations, and whether or not emigrants themselves are pushing for suffrage. The following sections will explore these three potential motivators. Vote Seeking

A number of scholars, recognizing that electoral systems are the “most specific manipu- lative instrument of politics,” have sought to analyze how political actors (typically political parties) shape the electoral system to their advantage (Sartori 1968, 273). Boix (1999) studies the conditions under which the ruling parties, “anticipating the effects of different electoral regimes, choose different sets of electoral rules to maximize their chances of securing parliamentary representation as well as cabinet posts,” while Benoit (2004) presents a model of electoral change based specifically “on the assumption that the objective of political parties in selecting among competing electoral institutions is to maximize their shares of seats in the legislature (Boix 1999, 610; Benoit 2004, 373).The introduction of universal suffrage at the turn of the century, for instance, is often pointed to as a major cause behind the shift from majoritarian to proportional representation systems in Europe; elite political actors,

19 fearing the loss of power due to an expanded electorate, changed the electoral rules so that the “electoral threshold” for obtaining seats was lowered (Rokkan et al. 1970; Boix 1999). The introduction of overseas suffrage in the latter half of the 20th century can also be viewed as stemming, in part, from the seat maximization goals of political parties. Numer- ous scholars have found that the adoption of specific electoral systems by new democracies in Eastern Europe during the 1990s “was at least partially motivated by partisan interests,” while Escobar (2007) and Tager (2006) argue that beliefs about which party would benefit from the overseas vote played a role in the expansion of overseas suffrage in both Colom- bia and Italy respectively (Benoit 2007; Birch, Millard and Popescu 2002; Elster, Offe and Preuss 1998; Geddes 1993). Such stereotypes (both accurate and inaccurate) concerning the political leanings of expatriates abroad can be important factors in party support or opposition to overseas suffrage. In Belgium, for instance, expatriates are viewed as more favorable to center right parties than the average Belgian, a belief that helps explain why the Francophone Liberal Party (PRL) has supported overseas suffrage while the Socialist parties have strongly opposed it (Lafleur 2011). When Croatia gained independence in 1991, the inclusion of overseas voting in the constitution was widely seen as a vote seeking move by the governing party, as Croatians abroad were highly perceived to support the nation- alist Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) ruling party. Indeed, until an electoral reform in 2000, external voters were guaranteed 12 seats in the national legislature, seats that were uniformly held by the HDZ. Unsurprisingly, the Social Democratic Party and other left-wing and left of center parties, who were disadvantaged by the overseas vote, were behind the reform in 2000 that limited (but did not eliminate) the overseas influence (Grace 2007). In turn, the decision by the Mexican government in 2006 to allow overseas voting, which had been debated since the 1980s, has been (partly) credited to the defeat of the PRI in the 2000 elections. As a ruling party, the PRI had been disinclined to allow overseas voting because party members believed that such a suffrage extension would mostly benefit the op-

20 position PRD party (CalderónChelius and Coss´ıo2004; Fitzgerald 2000). Finally, the 2010 redistricting of French legislative districts, which for the first time allowed overseas French citizens to be divided into overseas districts (instead of having their votes allocated to their original home districts) created controversy when the newspaper Le Monde estimated that the main center-right party (the Union for a Popular Movement) would benefit more than the main center-left party (the Socialist Party).14 Though partisan motivations behind the extension of the overseas vote might not be as well documented in other nations, since politicians are more likely to credit democratic motivations rather than vote seeking ones, we can still assume that vote seeking has likely played a large role in decisions to allow for overseas suffrage. In democratic systems, the power to push policies rests in the level of representation a given party has in the national legislature, and expanding the pool of eligible voters is one potential way to shift the power balance. Thus, I hypothesize that:

• Hypothesis 1 (Partisan Motivations): Countries in which the ruling party views overseas voting as a potential source of new voters will be more likely to adopt overseas voting.

Remittances

Party members may be tempted to extend overseas suffrage if they believe doing so will benefit them on election day, but legislative seats are not the only benefit that emigrant populations can offer politicians. The level of international remittances sent to the home state by citizens abroad may also play a role in a state’s decision to extend suffrage overseas (Baubock 2006; Bloemraad, Korteweg and Yurdakul 2008). While remittances were once considered to be rather insignificant monetary flows, they have now “emerged as the latest

14“La couleur politique des nouvelles circonscriptions des Francais a l’etranger”, Le Monde, September 26, 2009 “Redecoupage electoral - 11 deputes pour les Francais de l’etranger”, Le Petit Journal, October 22, 2009

21 cause celebre among governments, foundations, and multilateral institutions” (Barry 2006). The World Bank estimates that the total number of remittances transferred during 2012, for instance, was around $534 billion, a number that is projected to grow to $685 billion in 2015. As such, scholars have argued that sending countries increasingly view emigrants remittances as an important income source and one worth encouraging through increased political and social ties. Offering the vote to overseas citizens, politicians hope, will encourage those citizens to remain connected to their home state, hopefully through their checkbooks. Emigrants themselves, in turn, have argued that their economic contributions give them a legitimate interest in the home country and therefore the right to participate in politics. The 2002 “Absentee Voting Bill” approved by the Philippine Parliament has been largely attributed to the growing recognition of the economic benefits that flow from expats, while Tager (2006) argues that remittances sent back by Mexican emigrants living in the U.S. aided them in becoming “a significant political force” that was able to push for the extension of overseas suffrage in 2006 (Tager 2006, 46). Similarly, the decision by the Senegalese government in 1993 to allow for overseas voting (as part of a greater package of electoral reforms) was partly a result of the strong economic presence Senegalese emigrants have in their home state; “overseas Senegalese remit significant sums to the home country,” sums that have funded many rural community projects for which the Senegalese government was unable to assist with (Ellis 2007, 104). While there is no evidence that offering the overseas vote to emigrants will encourage them to send (or continue sending) remittances back home, politicians understandably view the overseas vote as one of a number of “diaspora policies” that can be used to develop stronger and longer lasting ties with citizens who choose to move abroad. The overseas vote can be portrayed as a recognition of the contributions made by overseas citizens (as it was in media reports concerning the Mexican overseas vote) while at the same time influencing the

22 votes of citizens still residing within the state. Itzigsohn and Villacr´es(2008), for instance, write that Dominican politicians, who adopted the overseas vote in 1997, “operate under the assumption that the opinions of family members abroad- the family members who send remittances- can sway the opinion of voters on the island”(Itzigsohn and Villacr´es2008, 670). If we look at the 30 countries that received the highest amount of remittances during 2010, we can see that only six governments do not allow overseas voting (China, Nigeria,

Table 4: Top Remittance Receiving Countries in 2010. Stars indicate states without overseas voting. India Germany Pakistan Vietnam* Ukraine Netherlands China* Bangladesh Poland Indonesia Romania Colombia Mexico Belgium Lebanon* Morocco Australia Jordan* Philippines Spain Egypt Russia Brazil Portugal France Nigeria* UK Serbia Guatemala* El Salvador

Lebanon, Vietnam, Guatemala, Jordan). Thus, given that international remittances are a growing and important income source for many sending countries, and one that politicians may wish to encourage (or provide recognition for), I hypothesize that:

• Hypothesis (Remittances): States with higher inﬂows of remittances will be more likely to adopt overseas voting.

Emigrant Pressures

Political maneuvering and dependence on (or desire for) emigrant remittances are certainly two very likely causes behind the growth in overseas voting, but we should also recognize that, over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, emigrant communities have been able to remain connected with and pertinent to their sending communities on a greater scale than ever before. “New transportation and communication technologies allow emigrants to remain actively engaged with events, people, and institutions in their countries

23 of origins, and [also] enhance emigration states’ capacity to reach citizens abroad” (Barry 2006, 15). As such, state governments are increasingly finding that emigrant diasporas have the potential to mobilize and campaign for more expansive emigration policies, particularly overseas voting. In the case of the Dominican Republic, for example, “the right to vote abroad was a highly contested issue, and migrants abroad became a powerful force behind acceptance of the vote”(Escobar 2007, 58). The two main opposition parties, the Partido Revolucionario Dominicana and the Partido de la Liberacion Dominicana had developed strong constituencies abroad, constituencies that Escobar (2007) argues were able to exert pressure on the national Congress to implement the 1997 electoral reform that paved the way for overseas voting to occur in the 2004 elections. Similarly, hometown associations, federations, and political organizations of Mexicans in the U.S. were active players in the push to adopt overseas voting: Mexican emigrants held mock elections during the 1988 and 1994 Mexican to “indicate their interest in participating” while at the same time emigrant citizens began to run for Mexican political offices on emigrant centered platforms (Tager 2006, 48). The United States, in turn, provides another example of emigrant pressure for the overseas vote. The U.S. decision to adopt overseas voting for all citizens, in contrast to only civil service and military personnel, in 1975 occurred after a campaign to send tea bags to Members of Congress alluding to the Boston Tea Party (Barry 2006). Furthermore, emigrant associations can be influential not only in the initial decision to adopt overseas voting, but also in later reforms to the system. The 2001 decision by the Colombian government to reserve legislative seats representing citizens abroad occurred because of the “initiative of the small, organized sectors of the Colombian community in the United States” (Escobar 2007). In turn, the gradual and ongoing adoption of internet voting in Switzerland has been heavily pushed by the Organization of the Swiss Abroad, whose members argue that postal voting can lead to the inadvertent disenfranchisement of citizens

24 whose votes are lost in transit. Such cases demonstrate how emigrants today are able to take advantage of new technologies that allow them to remain connected to, and up to date on, the politics of their home country. If suﬃciently motivated, emigrant organizations can organize and lobby governments for overseas voting rights. It is thus entirely possible that a major driver behind the suﬀrage of overseas citizens are those citizens themselves. Thus, I hypothesize that:

• Hypothesis (Emigrant Lobbying): States with a larger emigrant population will be more likely to adopt overseas voting.

IV A Policy Diﬀusion Approach

I have posited that overseas voting is best understood as a new policy that arose in a two stage process. First, the international normative environment evolved during the 20th century to rank universal suffrage, combined with free and fair elections, as one of the most important aspects of democratic governance. Secondly, individual state characteristics, such as vote seeking political parties, the growing dependence by some states on international remittances, and even outright pressure to extend suffrage from emigrant organizations have strongly influenced state decisions to undertake an electoral reform that transcends territorial boundaries. Past studies have attempted to quantitatively examine this process, but in doing so have failed to account for the fact that such policy adoptions might well be a temporally and spatially dependent process (Collyer and Vathi 2007; Rhodes and Harutyunyan 2010). If we look at Figures 5 and 6, in conjunction with Table 5, we can see that the growth of overseas voting tends to cluster in time and space: those states which adopted overseas voting before 1990 are more heavily concentrated in Western Europe and the Americas, while those states which adopted overseas voting after 1990 tend to be either African or Eastern and Central

25 European countries.15 Furthermore, more than 60% of those states which have adopted the overseas vote have done so in the past two decades. As such, any quantitative examination of this policy adoption should attempt to incorporate its potential spatial and temporal dimensions.

Figure 5: States Adopting Overseas Voting before 1990

Figure 6: States Adopting Overseas Voting after 1990

With this in mind, I argue that it might prove useful to examine the adoption of overseas voting through a policy diffusion perspective. The study of policy diffusion has a strong history in the American politics subfield (Walker 1969; Berry and Berry 1999; Balla 2001;

15Of course, one reason more Eastern European countries adopted overseas voting during the 1990s than before is simply that more Eastern European countries came into existence at that time. However, this does not undercut the fact that more African states have adopted overseas voting after 1990 than in the preceding years, nor that Western Europe and Latin America are the two regions with the earliest overseas suﬀrage adopters.

26 Table 5: Examples of Temporal Clusters of Overseas Voting

1980 1990 1992 1993 1994 2004 2006 Denmark Austria Croatia Argentina Belarus Afghanistan Ecuador Iran Bulgaria Estonia Guinea Kazakhstan Dominican Rep. Lao Peru Poland Latvia Guyana Namibia Hungary Mexico Vanuatu Romania Lithuania Moldova Namibia India Singapore Zimbabwe Slovenia Mali Senegal South Africa Iraq Panama Liechtenstein Tajikistan Mozambique Uzbekistan Nauru Tunisia Slovakia

Carter and LaPlant 1997; Mooney and Lee 1995), but can also be seen in studies concerning the emergence of trade liberalization (Elkins and Simmons 2004), unemployment policies in the OECD (Gilardi 2010) and election monitoring throughout the world (Kelley 2008; Hyde 2011). Approaching overseas voting from a policy diffusion perspective allows us to account for the fact that “interdependence is a defining feature of politics,” and that policy adoptions adopted in one country may well encourage (or be the result of) similar policy adoptions in neighboring states. The term neighbor need not merely signify geographic neighbors, but can also be construed to encompass cultural or ideological neighbors as well. The economic competition model, on the other hand, portrays policy diffusion as a process in which state officials are always on the watch for policy choices that might enable them to gain an economic advantage over their state competitors. This argument has led to projects seeking to understand how welfare regulations, environmental regulations, and trade liberalization policies in one state (at either the federal or international levels) are influenced by similar regulations in neighboring states (Bailey and Rom 2004; Berry and Baybeck 2005; Elkins, Guzman and Simmons 2008). Theories of diffusion that rely upon emulation as a

27 mechanism, in turn, are based more upon notions of ideological similarity and receptivity to international norms. States may adopt a new policy because it has gained legitimacy in the international arena and has been “socially constructed as appropriate” (Gilardi 2010, 66). Because there should be little reason to suspect that one state’s decision to adopt overseas voting could result in discernible economic effects in neighboring states (be they geographic or cultural neighbors), I posit that it is most appropriate to conceive of the diffusion of overseas voting as driven by processes of both learning and emulation. A “learning” centered approach allows us to take into account the possibility that states which chose to adopt overseas voting in the past two decades did so, partly, because they were able to learn from the earlier and successful adoptions made by states such as the U.S., Great Britain, Canada, Colombia, and Peru, among others. Nearly every state is now faced with the challenges of international migration, and overseas suffrage is one policy option for dealing with the practical problems that arise when a significant portion of a state’s citizens live abroad. Whether or not policymakers will view overseas voting as a viable policy option for their particular state may be dependent on domestic social and political factors, but it is not unreasonable to assume that policymakers will also look at the experiences of policymakers in foreign states to “assess the political feasibility of [such a] policy change” (Gilardi 2010, 653). At the same time, an “emulation” centered approach allows us to account for the fact that some states may adopt overseas voting because it seems to be the “thing to do,” and is now viewed as a socially acceptable, even desirable, policy option for states. This approach might help explain why 28 non-electoral democracies allow for overseas voting. For instance, Morocco adopted overseas voting in 2005, despite the fact that, as an absolute monarchy, the country does not yet hold truly free, democratic elections. The majority of political power is held by the King and his advisors, and political parties are unable to exert much influence. As the overseas votes will not have an appreciable effect one way or the other, the move to

28 extend overseas suffrage can be viewed as primarily symbolic (Collyer and Vathi 2007, 5). Recognizing that both international normative pressures and/or unique, domestic level factors may influence a state’s decision to adopt overseas voting, I argue that an event history model, specifically a mixed effects Cox model which directly models both spatial and temporal dependence, can shed more light on the spread of overseas voting than have past attempts using using ANOVA (Collyer and Vathi 2007) or logit (Rhodes and Harutyunyan 2010).

V Methodological Overview

The staple methodological approach in the state policy diffusion literature (which is dominated by studies of policy diffusion in the U.S. states) has been the event history model (Berry and Berry 1999; Mintrom and Vergari 1998; Haider-Markel 2001; Shipan and Volden 2008). Event history analysis is able to account for both non-time varying and time varying covariates, and has been seized on by the policy diffusion literature because of its ability to incorporate both internal and external determinants of state policy adoption.16 Such a model is well suited to modeling policy shifts, as it allows one to “conceive of a program or policy adoption by a state as an event that may or may not occur in any given time period” (Berry and Berry 1999). Thus, one is able to create a longitudinal dataset that tracks whether or not a state has adopted a policy in a given period; in this article, the dependent variable is a binary variable where 1 indicates that a country has adopted overseas voting and 0 indicates it has not. In a non-repeating events discrete time model, which I use here, the period of analysis is

16As noted by Berry and Berry (1990, 399): including both regional and internal influences in the same model guards against mistaking a spurious relationship between states’ years of adoptions and those of their neighbors as evidence of regional diffusion. If the relationship were spurious, the estimated effects of terms representing the behavior of nearby states would diminish to near zero in the EHA equation, as these regional effects would be appropriately “controlled” for the impacts of internal characteristics.

29 divided into a set of distinct units (years), and the “risk set,” or set of individuals (countries) at risk of experiencing an event, decreases over time. The hazard rate, or the probability that an individual country will experience the event during a particular time period given that it has not already experienced it in a previous period, is often what concerns scholars foremost, as it accounts for the time path of the data and allows one to compare hazard functions for different groups and conditioned by covariates of theoretical interest. Determining when a set of states becomes at risk of policy adoption is a matter of theoretical justification. It has been the practice of the diffusion literature to assume that states are not at risk of adopting a new policy until at least one other state has done so; as a result, scholars often use the first year of state adoption as year one of their dataset. Overseas voting proves to be difficult in this respect. The first instance of overseas voting (in the 20th century) occurred when Australia adopted the policy in 1902. However, the restrictions under which voting was allowed were so difficult as to make the actual practice of overseas voting at the time impossible. Canada and the UK began offering overseas voting to military personnel in 1915 and 1918 respectively, but moves to allow all citizens to vote from abroad would not occur until much later. A number of other countries (Iceland, Norway, New Zealand) would also begin to extend the franchise across borders during the first half of the 20th century, but as these moves were not intended to incorporate all overseas citizens, I classify them as an important precursor to the form of overseas voting that is the topic of this paper, but one that is substantively different. I begin my analysis in 1962 (the year Colombia began to allow the overseas vote to all expatriates) because overseas voting, in its current form, is a policy that really was not seen as legitimate or desirable until the latter half of the 20th century. An important theoretical component of policy diffusion is the notion that it is not only a time dependent process but a spatial process as well. We suspect that policies diffuse across both time and space, and while basic event history analyses can begin to explain the

30 temporal aspect of such processes, ignoring the possibility of spatial correlation could lead to spurious and misleading results. In past studies, researchers have attempted to account for the spatial dimension of policy diffusion by including a variable indicating whether or not a state’s neighbors have the policy in question (Mintrom and Vergari 1998; Bailey and Rom 2004; Volden 2006). As pointed out by Darmofal (2009), while such an approach is “useful in highlighting the interdependencies in political event processes, such an approach does not provide a generalized method for modeling spatial dependence nor is it consistent with the simultaneous nature of spatial, as opposed to temporal, dependence” (Darmofal 2009, 241). To allow for the fact that the adoption of overseas voting policies may well be (to an extent) both a temporal and spatially driven process, I turn towards frailty models. Frailty models are extensions of the Cox proportional hazards model, and allow us to account for the heterogeneity caused by unmeasured covariates or in situations where the study population needs to considered as a cluster of heterogeneous groups of individuals or geographic regions. I estimate and compare three different models: a standard Cox proportional hazards model, a mixed effects Cox model that assigns frailties to individual countries, and a mixed effects Cox model that assigns frailties to individual countries and fixed effects by region (Western Europe, Central/Eastern Europe, and Latin America). By incorporating random and fixed effects, we can account for the fact that some regions (or countries), for one reason or another, may be more likely to adopt overseas voting earlier (or later) than other regions (or countries).

Independent Variables

I include 8 independent variables in my models. First, because I have argued that democratic norms of participation and universal suﬀrage have played a role in the growth of overseas voting, I include the variables democracy, independence, noncitizen voting, and dual citizenship. My democracy measure is based on the Freedom House rankings of “free,”

31 “partly free,” and “not free;” countries receive a score of 3, 2, or 1 respectively. Indepen- dence is a binary variable that is coded 1 for countries which gained independence before 1970 and 0 for those that did not, while age counts the total number of years since a country gained independence. Both dual citizenship and noncitizen voting are binary variables that distinguish between those countries which allow for dual citizenship or noncitizen voting (coded as a 1) and those which do not (coded as a 0). Those variables which seek to measure a country’s sociopolitical factors include GDP, emigration, and remittances. GDP data (per capita) comes from both the World Bank and the Madison Project, a working group that measures the economic performance of different regions around the globe. Data on remittance inflows comes from the World Bank.17 Data on emigration rates comes from the Docquier, Marfouk, Ozden, and Schiff data set on international migration by education attainment. Though I hypothesize that party vote seeking is an important factor behind the rise of overseas voting, political actors are unlikely to admit to vote seeking intentions as underlying a decision to offer overseas voting, and are instead more likely to point to democratic norms or even emigrant contributions. Thus, creating a comprehensive and non-biased measure of vote-seeking with respect to overseas citizens proves to be beyond the scope of this paper.

VI Results

I estimate a standard Cox model, a mixed effects Cox model that assigns frailties to individual countries, and a mixed effects Cox model that assigns frailties to individual countries while also including a regional variable distinguishing between Western Europe, Central/Eastern Europe, and Latin America (coded as 1, 2, and 3 respectively). The best fitting model is

17Because certain countries have limited GDP or remittance data, I compute average GDP and average remittance inﬂows (as a percent of GDP) for each state using the years available for each country.

32 the mixed effects Cox model with individual frailties by country without regional fixed effects. Results are presented below.18

Table 6: Overseas Voting Adoption 1962-2013, Mixed Eﬀect Cox Model with Country Frail- ties Variable Coeﬃcient Hazard Std Error z p Democracy 0.2429 1.2749 0.2948 0.82 0.41 Noncitizen Vote 0.0881 1.0921 0.3784 .023 0.82 Age 0.0035 1.0034 1.0035 2.45 0.014 Independence 1.1870 3.2772 0.3758 3.16 0.001 Remittances 0.0051 1.0051 0.0230 0.22 0.820 GDP 0.0000 1.0000 0.0000 4.01 0.000 Emigration Rate -0.0931 0.9110 0.0298 -3.12 0.001 Dual Citizenship 0.1654 1.1799 0.3643 0.45 0.650 N = 70 AIC = 25.55 Analyzed using R

Independence, GDP, Age and Emigration Rate are all significant. Countries with higher GDPs have a higher risk of adopting overseas voting, as do older countries and those which gained independence in 1970 or later. Surprisingly, higher emigration rates appear to lower a country’s chance of adopting overseas voting. In Figure 8, I provide a graph of the Nelson- Aelen cumulative hazard, which indicates that the hazard, or risk of a given state adopting overseas voting, has increased over time when we do not take into account covariates. Figure 9 provides a graph of the Nelson Aelen hazard estimates sorted by independence. Unsur- prisingly, after 1990 we see the hazard rate increase sharply (as a number of countries which gained independence at this time adopted overseas voting). Given that the negative effect of emigration rate is unexpected, I also provide a closer examination of this variable in Figure 10. For clarity, I group emigration rates (specifically the percentage of tertiary educated emigrants) into three categories: under 5%, between 5 and 10%, and above 10%. As we can see, lower emigration rates correspond with a higher hazard rate.

18The standard cox model results were very similar to the results from the mixed effects Cox model with country frailties, but had a much higher AIC (347.77 vs. 25.55). The mixed effects cox model with country frailties and a regional dummy variable fit much better than the standard model, but a little less so than

33 Figure 7: Baseline Hazard Rate 1.50 1.00 0.50 0.00 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2013 Time

Figure 8: Hazard Rate by Independence 2.00 1.50 1.00 0.50 0.00 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2013 Time

Independence = 0 Independence = 1

VII Discussion

I have argued that the institutionalization of overseas voting occurred as the result of a two stage process. First, normative understandings of both proper election behavior and the mixed eﬀects models without a regional variable (AIC of 26.9 vs. 25.55).

34 Figure 9: Hazard Rate by Emigration Rate 2.00 1.50 1.00 0.50 0.00 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2013 Years

<5% <10% >10%

definitions of “who” should be considered legitimate political actors underwent a significant change during the 20th century; second, individual state level factors such as emigrant lobbying and dependence on (or desire for) international remittances may have played a role in the decision by states to encourage political ties with their diaspora populations. I find support for this argument, particularly with respect to my hypotheses concerning a changing normative environment. Model results indicate that state’s with higher GDPs have a higher risk of adopting overseas voting, as do older countries and those which gained independence in 1970 or later. Such findings make sense; states with more wealth are presumably better equipped to adopt new institutions, particularly institutions, such as overseas voting, which can become quite costly as the number of potential voters grows. The fact that older countries are more likely to adopt overseas voting aligns with experience; countries such as Great Britain, the United States, Norway, and Iceland were all frontrunners in the move to adopt overseas voting, but did so many years after their own independence and only after other previously

35 excluded societal groups had been admitted into the political process. For these countries, overseas voting was one institutional change among many geared towards expanding political participation. Younger states, in contrast, specifically those which gained independence after 1970, are also found to have a higher chance of adopting the overseas vote. This indicates that younger democracies may have different reasons for offering the overseas vote as compared to their older counterparts. In newly established states, overseas voting has been adopted in tandem with universal suffrage, and is often introduced as a way to both establish democratic credentials from an early date and as a way to incorporate external citizens who may have left during more turbulent times. This finding suggests that overseas voting, like election monitoring, has been viewed by young democracies as normatively appropriate, even expected, and as a “signal” to appropriate actors that the new government is setting out on a democratic path. While the findings concerning GDP and the age of a state are expected and align with my hypotheses, the negative effect of emigration on a country’s chances of adopting overseas voting and the insignificant effect of international remittances are surprising. Such findings are contradictory to my expectations and the general assumptions of the literature regarding overseas suffrage. With respect to emigration, this finding is even more surprising because the emigration measure used in this analysis looks at the percentage of educated emigrants, precisely those individuals we would assume to be most likely to lobby for voting rights. Why would states with larger emigrant populations, and therefore greater numbers of individuals facing disenfranchisement when moving abroad, be less likely to offer the overseas vote? One possible explanation is that state actors are less inclined to offer the overseas vote to large diaspora populations, both because enabling such suffrage may prove too costly and because the possibility of the overseas population placing a decisive role in domestic elections is still considered somewhat problematic. It may be well and good to allow a small, fairly

36 insignificant population (who can only claim a few seats in the legislature) to participate in elections, but might be another matter entirely to enfranchise a population that may well trump the domestic vote if properly mobilized. Such reasoning might explain why a number of small Caribbean nations such as St.Kitts and Nevis or St.Vincent and the Grenadines do not allow overseas voting; their domestic populations are so small (around 40,000 and 150,000 respectively), that allowing overseas citizens to vote could actually damage the legitimacy of domestic elections. Another explanation is that state actors view emigrant populations differently based upon demographics. For instance, state actors may be willing to extend the vote if they believe the emigrant population, though large, is mainly made up of less educated individuals who are are less likely to turn up at the voting booth in large numbers (and indeed, overseas turnout is commonly quite low) while countries with emigrant populations that are dominated by educated individuals (perhaps countries’ whose emigration is more of a ”brain drain” problem) might view the overseas vote as problematic. The finding that international remittances has no discernible effect is also surprising, given that much of the literature, and even many state actors, have referenced remittances as an important factor in the growth of overseas voting. It seems that while international remittances might have played a role in specific cases (Mexico, for example) we should not consider it as a major driving force behind the rise of overseas voting. States may be increasingly dependent upon international remittances as a source of income, but it seems that state actors do not view overseas voting as a way to increase such revenue nor, by refusing to offer the vote, as potentially decreasing inflows. Indeed, it is unlikely that emigrants might refuse to send money back home to family and friends because they are not permitted to vote.

37 VIII Conclusion

Why have so many states decided to enfranchise overseas citizens in the past few decades? My findings indicate that a changing normative environment most likely played a role, one that lead both older and younger democracies to adopt overseas voting. Older democracies adopted the overseas vote as part of an ongoing process directed towards widening political participation; young democracies did so because the normative environment in which they gained independence viewed overseas voting as expected and legitimate. State specific social and political factors also played a role (in tandem with the normative environment) in states’ decision to offer the overseas vote, though the finding that the emigration rate has a negative effect on the chances of the overseas vote was particularly surprising. Overseas voting may be considered normatively appropriate, but states will be leery of adopting a new institution that might damage the legitimacy of domestic elections (perhaps because the overseas vote might trump the domestic vote) or one that might not be viewed as contributing enough benefits to outweigh the costs of implementation. These findings present us with a strong grounding for further research in the area of overseas voting. First, as this study has only (quantitatively) examined overseas voting in Europe and Latin America, future research would benefit from including all independent states.19 Including both Asian, Middle Eastern, and African territories may allow us to better examine some of the hypothesis proposed in the article, particularly the effect of democracy, remittance inflows, and regional effects. Because Europe and Latin America, compared to other regions in the world, are on relatively equal footing when it comes to the Freedom House democracy scores, it is possible that the effect of democracy is clouded. The same may be said for the effect of remittances, as a number of nations that receive the highest levels of remittances are found in Asia and Africa. Though regional differences do not seem to

19Indeed, that is the second stage of this project.

38 play a role when comparing Latin America, Western Europe, and Eastern/Central Europe, it is again possible that such differences will play a role when we taking into account Middle Eastern and Asian countries.20 Finally, it would also benefit researchers to study the role of political parties in the decision to offer overseas voting, because such a suffrage expansion has most certainly been influenced by political maneuvering. Why do some parties view the overseas vote as a an electoral resource while others view it as a threat? Are certain types of parties more likely to adapt to the changing definition of state memberships? It is these sort of questions that future research should endeavor to answer. As a result of increased migration and technologies that allow emigrants to remain connected to their home territories, questions of who has the right to participate and how will certainly remain relevant for many years to come. Additionally, as democratic governance continues to hold sway as the accepted form of best government, understanding the factors behind the acceptance of overseas voting may help policymakers determine whether or not noncitizen resident voting (basically the opposite of overseas voting and the one remaining population group facing disenfranchisement) is feasible for a given country. Suffrage restrictions, of any sort, are certainly artifacts of past times.

20Even more importantly, as the theory presented in this article is one that encompasses overseas voting as a global phenomenon, a quantitative analysis that examines all regions is surely the most appropriate.Data collection is already underway for extending the scope of this project.

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