Absence makes the vote grow farther: Emigrant voting patterns across 105 homeland elections

Studies of emigrant voting in homeland elections have questioned to what extent emigrants change their political preferences from afar. One set of arguments posits that the migration process transforms emigrants’ political views and preferences through exposure to more consolidated democratic institutions in the countries of residence. An alternative perspective argues that emigrant electorates display similar political preferences to home country electorates because their main political socialization take place prior to departure and/or mirror comparable socio-economic differences, which in turn constitute the basis of their vote choice also in their homeland. Drawing on an extensive novel dataset of emigrant votes per country of residence in more than 100 homeland elections worldwide, combined with the V-Party data, we estimate pairwise fixed effects regressions to show that political distance, defined as the difference in POLITY scores between the countries of origin and residence, is related to systematic differences between the emigrant and homeland vote. This result is largely driven by migrants moving to countries with higher democracy scores. We provide further evidence that the mechanism underlying this result is political socialization, where emigrants (1) coming from less democratic origin countries and (2) staying longer in the residence country are more likely to be interested in political issues.