Clientelism and External Voting In Europe: A Comparative Analysis

Sebastián Umpierrez de Reguero (Autonomous University of Madrid)is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) and Tallinn University (Estonia). He is a Visiting Scholar at Casa Grande University (Ecuador), Co-convenor of the Steering Committee of the ECPR Standing Group "Migration and Ethnicity" and Chair of the Election's Executive Committee and Co-Convenor of the Steering Committee of the Standing Group "Migration, Citizenship, and Political Participation" at IMISCOE. He obtained a Dual Ph.D. in Political Science at Diego Portales University (Chile) and in Humanities at Leiden University (Netherlands). His research interests are electoral studies, legislative politics, and transnational migration. Mari-Liis Jakobson (Tallinn University) is an associate professor of political sociology at Tallinn University. Her research interest relate to populism, migrant transnationalism and political communication. Since 2023, she is the PI of the project "Breaking into the mainstream while remaining radical: the sidestreaming strategies of the populist radical right parties" funded by the Estonian Research Council's personal starter grant. She is the director of the Political Science MA programme and mainly teaches courses related to political communication, democracy, populism and qualitative research methods. Inci Öykü Yener-Roderburg (University of Duisburg-Essen) is a research associate at the University of Duisburg-Essen's Institute for Turkish Studies and a lecturer at the University of Cologne's Cologne Center for Comparative Politics. Until recently, Dr. Yener-Roderburg acted as an external collaborator for the ERC-funded project "Migration, transnationalism and social protection in (post-) crisis Europe", CEDEM, University of Liège, Belgium, and contributed as a country expert for Germany in the NSW Government funded project "Building Democratic Resilience", the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance (CDDGG), University of Canberra, Australia. Abstract: Although several case studies have suggested a relevant link between most-voted parties and their patronage practices abroad, scholarly knowledge on the overall impact of clientelism on external voting is still scarce. So far, there is no comparative analysis of how and why patronage practices affect the electoral success of parties when they compete across national borders, and if this effect is replicated or differentiated from the domestic arena. Namely, either (a) the political elite adapts similar strategies to entice every type of voter regardless of their residency (replication effect), or (b) they include another set of strategies to exclusively capture external votes (differentiation effect). Employing two original datasets with information on non-resident citizens’ voter turnout within Europe, this study first correlates clientelism with electoral preferences of citizens living abroad comparing domestic and extraterritorial arenas. Thereafter, we unpack how and why political parties implement clientelist practices using three case studies: Estonia, Spain, and Turkey. In doing so, we shed light, specifically, on the replication and differentiation effects of clientelism across borders and contribute to the existing literature on transnational political mobilization, more generally.