External voting, diaspora party systems & (il)liberal remittances: A comparative analysis of Central European post-accession elections

Can the experience of migration and of life in a different country influence people’s political preferences? A positive answer seems intuitively plausible, but empirical evidence is scarce. The most straightforward - although far from unproblematic - measure of political preferences is elections. Enfranchisement can take place in the country of residence, where migrants are often allowed to vote in local elections without the requirement of naturalization, and in national elections following the obtaining of citizenship. More importantly, however, the number of states that allow for external voting – i.e. that permit non-resident citizens to participate in elections in their country of origin – has risen significantly over the past three decades (Navarro, Morales, and Gratschew 2007; Turcu and Urbatsch 2015). It is in external voting where migrants’ political preferences can be most fully expressed and contrasted with the preferences of voters ‘back home’. How do CEE migrants vote, and how different are the results of elections in diasporas from the national results? This paper presents the first systematic comparative assessment of CEE migrant external voting behavior following EU accession. Even though the electoral behavior of EU-diasporas is a highly salient issue from the perspective of European political dynamics, it remains a neglected topic of study. Comparative research on external voting to date has focused on turnout (Burgess and Tyburski 2020; Ciornei and Østergaard-Nielsen 2020), with the study of the actual results of external voting concerning mainly non-European democracies, such as those of Latin America (Lafleur and Sánchez-Domínguez 2015). What is hitherto unexplored is whether external voting displays any consistent patterns and whether diasporas emulate country of origin party systems or develop their own unique systems. We have gathered data on external voting in fifteen Western European states (12 EU member states and Norway, Iceland and Switzerland) for the parliamentary and presidential elections of ten CEE countries. We began by examining the most recent elections in all CEE countries (2017-2020) and assessed data availability, the size of diasporas, and the numbers of ballots cast. For further analysis, we exclude countries of origin where data for different migrant communities is unavailable (Hungary, Estonia, Slovakia), as well as those where there are less than 1000 votes cast in all districts abroad (Czech Republic, Slovenia). Our main analysis focuses on all parliamentary and presidential elections in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania since the election prior to EU accession in 2004/2007.