Would Democratic Backsliders be Elected to Office if only CEE Migrants Voted?

Ben Stanley (SWPS University) is an Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw and Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex. His research is focused on political parties, voting behaviour, democratisation and populism in Central and Eastern Europe, and he is a member of the research team for the Polish National Election Study. Kacper Szulecki (University of Oslo) is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science, Oslo University. He was previously Dahrendorf Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, and a guest researcher at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), as well as a researcher at the Cluster of Excellence "Cultural Foundations of Integration" at the University of Konstanz, German, and an intern at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) in Amsterdam. He is also board director of the Environmental Studies and Policy Research Institute (ESPRi), an environmental policy think-tank based in Wroclaw, Poland; as well as an editor of the weekly magazine "Kultura Liberalna" (Poland). Michał Kotnarowski (SWPS University) is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Institute of Political Studies since 2015. His research interests are focused on electoral behaviour in Poland. Abstract: Different societies hold quite different perceptions of the ‘average’ political preferences of their émigré communities, and this is reflected in the diversity of approaches among scholars who have sought to theorize these preferences. Some have perceived migrants as a pro-liberal force, leading to the notion of "remitting democracy back home" (Fomina 2019; Kessler and Rother 2016; Pérez-Armendáriz and Crow 2010; Rother 2019). Others have viewed exilic communities as predominantly composed of "long-distance nationalists" (Anderson 1992) who tend to support illiberal or far-right political forces without subjecting themselves to the consequences of their government (Mügge et al. 2019; Rother 2009; Sevi et al. 2020), and who transfer "illiberal remittances" instead of democracy (Szulecki 2020). Within the EU, the question of external voting acquires additional complexity. Following the Eastern enlargements of 2004 and 2007, the idea that migration from the post-communist states in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) to consolidated democracies would generate "democratic remittances" was quite commonplace (Koinova 2009). However, if in fact migrants tend to lean towards the nationalist and populist right, then the political dynamics of diasporas may be more reflective of broader democratic backsliding in the region (Bakke and Sitter 2020; Bermeo 2016; Stanley 2017). Using a new dataset of election results in six CEE countries from the time before EU accession until 2021, this paper will analyse the composition of parliaments and governments, and the outcomes of presidential elections, if only emigrant voters participated.