Emigrant Voting and Political Bias in France, Italy and the UK

The growth of globalisation and increasing flows of migration across the world in recent decades have generated new concerns and debates relating to the concept and practice of extra-territorial citizenship. Increasing numbers of states have enfranchised their emigrant citizens in different ways and for different reasons, and this in turn has given rise to a new field of academic research into emigrant voting, to which this paper aims to make an original contribution. It will do so through the analysis of the question of the assumed political preferences of emigrant voters as a factor influencing states' policy decisions regarding emigrant voting rights, and it will focus on three case studies : France, Italy and the U.K. These three countries have contrasting experiences but share an assumed political bias of emigrant voters towards parties of the Right and in each case this has been a key factor in determining government policy towards enfranchising expatriates. More specifically, I will first examine the Italian elections of 2006 and the French elections of 2012, which did not produce the political gains anticipated by Right wing leaders. I will then review the case of the U.K., where the question of overseas voting rights is highly politicised, due to the widely assumed preference of expatriates for the Conservative Party, which has achieved 'ownership' of this issue since its introduction of limited voting rights for overseas voters in 1983, and confirmed by the recent proposal to extend this franchise in the Votes For Life Bill to be passed in the current parliament. I will report results of a pilot survey of overseas voters designed to test empirically these assumptions of political bias, and will discuss the implications of these results for the upcoming parliamentary debate. I will conclude by drawing together the commonalities in the three case studies, and by identifying lessons which could be learnt by policy makers to inform future decisions on emigrant voting rights.