Crisis and Change: The Right of Greek Citizens to Vote Abroad

In December 2019 the Greek Parliament approved with a large majority of 288 out of 300 a bill that allowed Greeks of the diaspora to exercise their voting rights from their place of residence. This was a major change in Greek politics and marked a successful conclusion in a series of prior unsuccessful attempts to facilitate the democratic right of Greek citizens abroad. The fact that this major change took place in the year 2019 is not a mere chronological coincidence but we claim has to do with a number of factors connected with a decade long economic crisis which generated major socio-political pressures that led to a breakthrough reform in homeland-diaspora political relations. This paper discusses the reasons for this major change by looking at the factors that led to such a momentous decision in Greek politics. We look at the crisis as a “critical juncture” that constituted an important catalyst for change, redefining the diaspora’s relationship with the homeland. The article argues that a unique constellation of contextual, agency and normative variables made this process irreversible, in sharp contrast with the pre-crisis period of bypassing the issue and ending with two unsuccessful attempts in 2001 and 2009. Regarding the theoretical framework of the article, and in order to examine the causes of this very important political change in the diaspora’s engagement with the homeland, we adopt three hypotheses. First, that the crisis acted as a critical period with a transformative potential. Second, that internal and external actors, be they political parties and influential media at home, or ‘diaspora entrepreneurs’ abroad (Koinova 2017) mobilised towards the goal. Third, the existence of an international regime of widespread application of the diasporic vote abroad as a norm of homeland-diaspora transnational political engagement (Gamlen 2019) was a further pressure on the Greek polity to address what was up to then an exclusionary practice of non-facilitation. Our focus rests therefore on a triptych of variables comprising the context (the crisis), the agency (homeland and diaspora actors), the norm (transnational voting practice) and how these interacted to bring about this important political change in the case of Greece. Our main argument is that the adoption by the Greek Parliament of the facilitation of the diasporic vote abroad was the outcome of these three factors all of which were necessary but not sufficient in their own right to bring about this outcome; it was the combination of these three that brought about the chosen result. The method of investigation and analysis in this article rests on empirical research and process tracing of the Greek case during the years of crisis. For this purpose, we conducted primary research involving discourse analysis of parliamentary debates, interviews and panel discussions with experts and politicians.