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External Voting: its impacts on society
10/25/13

Increasingly, with the rise in external voting, emigrants are being given the opportunity to play a role in the politics of their home country. This new right has raised its batch of new cooperative programmes, concerns and occasional practical difficulties. The new book by Jean-Michel Lafleur, deputy director of CEDEM, reviews the reasons for this development, the interest migrants have in this vote and the consequences on their relations with their home and host countries.

COVER Droit vote internationalThe possibility of voting in your home country from your host country is not always easy for migrants and their descendants. At the beginning of the 20th century, external votes were only granted to people who served their nation's interests from abroad, like diplomats, sailors and military personnel. It wasn't until the last two decades that a larger number of States granted the voting right to their emigrant populations to the extent that these States are now in the majority. Emigrants are currently playing an increasingly important role in the political balance of their home countries.

These evolutions moved Jean-Michel Lafleur, research associate at the FRS-FNRS and deputy director of CEDEM (Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies) at the University of  Liège, to devote, from 2004 to 2008, his doctoral thesis to “transnational politics”. He updated his research to publish this year a reference work on the emigrant's right to vote from abroad (2). One of the first chapters explains the reasons that push States to grant this right. “We are seeing a transformation in the relations between migrants and country of origin, in particular African and Latin American countries, where remittances sent by emigrants to their families in the home country exploded in the 1990s and 2000s,” the author explains. “Many countries of origin have noticed that migration is a resource, an economic potential. Many public policies have therefore developed to strengthen the ties between emigrants and home country. The right to vote from abroad —external voting— is one of these policies, just as the recognition of dual nationality or of programmes that help migrants invest in their home country.” The democratic transitions seen in Eastern Europe and in many African and Latin American countries provide another explanation for the development of external voting in addition to the pressure from the migrant populations.

The case of Italy, which only granted external voting rights to its emigrants in 2006 while the Italian emigrants had been demanding it since the 1960s, demonstrates that this claim is not just a formality. Jean-Michel Lafleur writes: “There needs to be a parliamentary context that favours this kind of evolution, especially in coalition governments in parliamentary democracies: when the right to vote is granted to a new population, we open the door to a change in electoral results. In Italy, when the right to vote was given to three million people, the political parties tried to anticipate the trends in their votes. This fear of a swing in the election results pushed Italy to create a special constituency in which Italians abroad were able to elect only six senators and twelve members of parliament. The impact of the vote of these millions of voters is therefore limited to 18 seats”. Without this measure, the results of the elections in some Italian electoral constituencies could have been strongly influenced by the diaspora where it originated.

(1) CEDEM (Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies) is a centre based at the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (institute of humanities and social sciences) which carries out theoretical or empirical research in the field of human migration, ethnic relations and racism. It is particularly interested in relationships between the migratory processes and inequalities in development. Its research is carried out from a multidisciplinary perspective (political sciences, sociology, anthropology, international relations, law).
(2) “Transnational Politics and the State. The External Voting Rights of Diasporas”, Routledge, New York, 2013.

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