Four Patterns of Non-resident Voting Rights

Abstract

Although the number of external voters has increased significantly in the past decades, the normative and political dilemmas of absentee voting still receive little scholarly attention. The few theoretical attempts that try to analyze systematically non-resident political rights from a normative perspective focus exclusively on dilemmas presented by expatriate citizens. The aim of this article is to contextualize the normative dilemmas and practical problems related to non-resident voting, with a special emphasis on the dilemmas related to the enfranchisement of ethnic kin populations created by shifting borders. The article identifies four patterns of external enfranchisement and offers an analysis of the reasons behind the political inclusion of the different types of external population. The main argument of the article is to highlight the different reasons behind the enfranchisement of temporary absentees (including refugees), economic migrants, exiles of past undemocratic regimes and kin-minorities. While in the case of expatriates, the existence of effective ties between migrants and homelands is used as the normative basis for the maintenance of extraterritorial political rights, ethnic kin-minorities are enfranchised as part of ethnic engineering projects.

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