The Becoming of Emigrant Partisans: How and Why Emigrants Join Political Home-Country Parties

Political parties no longer organize only domestically. Plenty of parties have extended their activities beyond the national borders, and shape the daily life of citizens residing abroad. Parties maintain offices in foreign cities, campaign in diaspora communities, and engage in local immigrant community projects. These on-site activities require committed emigrant partisans on the ground. So far, however, we know very little about the rationales of emigrants to join political home country parties or the mechanisms that underpin their transnational party engagement. Controversially, existing research on emigrants’ political behavior has largely focused on out-of-country voting or cross-border involvement in civic and philanthropic activities. This paper addresses this void and scrutinizes the trajectories of Latin American emigrant partisans residing in Spain. More than 30 semi-structured interviews were carried out with home country party entrepreneurs of Bolivian, Ecuadorian, and Peruvian origin. The analysis sheds light on how and why emigrants become active in home country parties. I argue that traditional approaches from the partisanship literature help explain why migrants engage in home country parties but yet are insufficient to account for transnational partisanship at large. This is because migration-specific factors, such as political socialization before migration, regional home country identities, party mobilization across borders, and embedment in transnational social networks come into play as well. That said, parties with stronger societal roots in the home country fare better in attracting partisans abroad. These findings help us to better understand how political parties thrive or fail abroad. Moreover, this paper contributes to the evolving literature on political parties abroad and provides important insights into migrants’ political cross-border activism.