Who is Representing the Non-Resident Finnish Citizens in the Legislative Process of Finland?

The research paper examines the instances of representation of the expatriate Finnish citizen in the different stages of the legislative process in Finland: the preparation of law bills, the process in the Parliamentary committees and in the plenary sessions of the Finnish Parliament Eduskunta. I try to answer the question who formulates an expat Finn issue and who is talking about the issue while it is on the political agenda. For example, do politicians, officials, expatriate organizations, the Finnish Expatriate Parliament or individual citizens bring these issues to the legislative agenda? Here, my research approach is descriptive. Newly digitalized collections of legislative documents create novel opportunities to seek efficiently through a large number of records and find themes that have not gained much attention, in addition to the more obvious ones like the dual citizenship or recently the postal voting. In Finland, the Finnish diaspora has not been a fervently debated issue and only rarely mentioned in the plenary debates of the parliament. Therefore understanding the political forces that have influence on the issues concerning the Finnish citizen abroad requires using multiple sources of politically relevant documents. Two related questions arise: firstly, when studying the representation of a sub-group of the Finnish citizen, the non-resident Finns, a relevant question is whether the diversity in this sub-group is represented in the political process or are some expatriate Finns left unrepresented. Secondly, in this context, one may ask ‘who is the state’ where political activity is directed. The issues of expatriate Finns have rarely been particularly politicized, and in practice the question remains whether it is more of a relationship between officials and expatriates than participation in Finnish politics. Those questions are beyond the scope of this presentation, but they serve as a motivation to provide a description about the issues and the agents in the legislative arena.