Building political bridges between parties in home and host-countries: a conceptual map

The literature identifies a wide diffusion of emigrant voting rights and new electoral arenas. Not surprisingly, political parties increasingly started campaigning across borders. The paper aims to map the different forms of interaction national parties implement when trying to mobilize transnationally. In addition to describing the implications for the literature on migration studies and party politics, the paper examines demand-side and supply-side explanations for this transnational extension of party politics. The paper further maps the literature with regard to the different repertoire of transnational linkage strategies national parties deploy to tap into communities abroad. Departing from these premises, this article is an effort to set the existing empirical and theoretical analyses into a new framework that delineates the main types of interaction between national parties and communities abroad based on (1) the nature of the party’s organization abroad and (2) the programmatic orientation of the party with regard to these communities This new typology aims to capture the diversity of the parties as they exist in the transnational arena and, hence, to provide the ground for new hypotheses testing or theory-building.