Romania and Hungary represent two cases that have sizable emigrant communities and kin state minorities. The discourse surrounding their enfranchisement had taken diverging routes.
In Hungary, voting rights came as a result of a gradual process. It focused in large part on the impact of the political rights, impact and granting citizenship to kin minorities. In Romania, enfranchisement was immediate. After 1989, Romania granted accelerated access to citizenship to kin minorities and immediate extended voting rights.
But, the research on external populations voting behavior focuses either on kin minorities or on emigrant communities that encompassed kin minorities. This framework misses the opportunity to observe the differences in behavior of these two communities and the differentiated discourse and policies employed by the kin state towards them.
The electoral impact of the community abroad is either praised as having a democratic effect, or supporting those in power captured in clientelist exchanges. In this paper, it is argued that the political behavior of kin minorities and emigrants are different.
Following the electoral results and discourse in the two countries, we show that the political behavior of the external voters depends on their status as emigrants or kin minority. Furthermore, their electoral impact has a polarizing effect in Hungary and a destabilizing effect on the reformist ideological camp in Romania. This paper claims that the electoral impact of kin minorities has been overlooked. This makes a case for investigating the important role kin minorities and emigrants have on the politics of the kin state.
