The enfranchisement of emigrant citizens living outside their home states has been a notable trend in recent decades (Caramani and Grotz, 2015). While some see emigrant voting rights as an important part of the most recent wave of suffrage reform, for others it is a contested development which ruptures the very essence of democracy by breaking the link between citizenship and residence. The international research identifies a number of variables which drive the extension of voting rights. LaFleur, and Calderon Chalius (2011) focus on democratization in the sending state, remittances from emigrants and emigrant lobbying while Lisi et al. (2015) emphasize the role of the EU and the Council of Europe in promoting external voting rights. Among European states, the Republic of Ireland is now something of an outlier in not enfranchising its emigrant citizens abroad. Conscious of this anomaly, an elite level debate emerged in the early 2000s but there remains a persistent reluctance to advance emigrant voting rights.
Emigrant voting is a complex challenge. Ireland has one of the largest emigrant communities in the world with 17.5% of its native born population living outside the state (OECD, 2014). It has a global diaspora with generous citizenship provisions and an estimated 70 million people around the world entitled to claim Irish citizenship. And Northern Ireland presents a unique scenario with all people born in Northern Ireland (a region of the UK) entitled to claim citizenship in the Republic of Ireland. To a great extent, the desire to embrace emigrants and engage with the wider diaspora in Ireland is tempered by concerns about ‘swamping’ of elections. This paper will use the framework of institutionalism to trace the emergence of emigrant voting rights as a policy issue in the early 2000s, its pathway through a citizens’ assembly in 2013, politicization at moral referendums on marriage and abortion in 2015 and 2018 to the commitment (now abandoned) to hold a referendum on the issue in 2019. The research will use interviews with key actors, policy documents and early polling to assess policy on emigrant voting rights.
