Diaspora Mobilization and Homeland Politics: Opportunities and Challenges for Sending Countries

Abstract

Countries worldwide have gradually granted voting rights to non-resident nationals: a growing number of emigrants and their descendants is more visible around the globe each year. Political participation, consultation and representation have extended into the transnational realm to establish, control or foster state-diaspora nexus. Bearing this dynamic context in mind, several scholars have examined migrants’ strategies to influence homeland politics via electoral mobilisation and through non-electoral modes of political engagement (e.g., protests, demonstrations, boycotts, petitions, artistic expressions). Others have analysed the role of transnational networks across different host countries regarding political mobilisation from abroad and political parties’ transnational role within a new arena of citizenship. Non-resident nationals comprise a new niche of voters while also present many opportunities and challenges for sending countries’ electoral and party systems, diplomatic offices and migrant civil organisations. Ranging from political parties’ responsiveness to diaspora demands, to connections between migrant civil organisations and external voting, as well as to assessing public opinion on diaspora engagement in homeland politics, this panel brings together a set of papers exploring various angles of migrants’ political participation and representation at both the individual and aggregate levels.

Title	Details
Transnational Political Mobilization Through Religion: Evidence from Turkish Organizations in Germany and France	View Paper Details
Podemos En El Exterior: a Transnational Partisan Network Mobilizing Young “Exiliados” at the Crossroads of Spanish and Receiving-Countries Politics	View Paper Details
Returning Diaspora Members as “Vernacularizing Agents of Social Change” and Transnational “Diaspora Mobilizers” – The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina	View Paper Details
Transnational Voting Behaviour in Two Polities: an Analysis of Germans of Turkish Descent in the Immigrant German Election Study	View Paper Details
Who Speaks in the Name of the Diaspora? A Framework of Representative Claims Analysis to Assess the Legitimacy of Diasporic Engagement	View Paper Details