Why Migrants Support Populists: Exploring the Effects of Integration and Protest Voting

While migrants are sometimes depicted as voting with their feet against undesirable circumstances in their home countries, many of them also express themselves at polling stations abroad. In order to contribute to the recently emerging debate on migrant voters’ political preferences, this paper will address how the contexts of immigration and emigration and the resulting socioeconomic position of emigrants affect their propensity to vote for political parties considered as populist. The study will employ a panel dataset comprising external voting results in presidential and parliamentary elections from select European and Latin American countries, and data of the Global Party Survey to indicate the level of populism of the parties and/or candidates. The study suggests that in general, emigrants’ propensity to vote for populists can be explained by the same theories that are normally applied to domestic voters, there are also some additional factors, such as the resocialization effect and the political conjuncture of the time when larger waves of emigration occurred that need to be accounted for when explaining emigrants’ propensity to vote for populists.