Resident Citizens’ Attitudes to Electoral Rights for Non-resident Citizens in Five EU Countries

Over the last few decades countries around the world have become increasingly likely to provide their citizens living abroad with electoral rights and many countries are also making it more convenient to use these rights. The expansion of electoral rights and discussions about the form they should take have spurred a vivid scholarly debate. But very little is known about what citizens living in the country of origin think about these rights. Considering that the electoral rights of citizens living abroad in some cases could have a substantial impact on the outcome of elections, this relative dearth of knowledge on the perspective of resident citizens on this topic is problematic. That said, asking resident citizens their views about electoral rights for non-resident citizens requires a carefully calibrated approach. First, it is a complicated issue on which political theorists hold diverging opinions, and where practical electoral arrangements vary greatly across countries. Some countries provide wide-ranging rights; others provide their citizens living abroad with no or very limited electoral rights. Second, it is an issue that is quite distant from the daily lives of most resident citizens. They generally have no experience of voting from abroad and little knowledge of what that may imply. To address these issues and to gain a more informed (resident) citizen view of the electoral rights of non-resident citizens we employ a survey experiment using vignettes in five European countries (Belgium, Finland, Poland, Portugal, Ireland) with very different legislation on electoral rights for non-resident citizens (n=5x1200). We study how attitudes toward external voting rights and the right to stand as a candidate from abroad are affected by vignettes where different combinations of arguments in favour and against external electoral rights are presented to the respondents. This will reveal how citizens evaluate central claims from the literature on the electoral rights of non-resident citizens and it will also assess how the country context makes a difference to how attitudes on the issue are formed.