The Enfranchisement of Citizens Abroad in a Comparative Perspective

In this article, I start by looking at the historical origin of external voting in an attempt to define the practice as a set of administrative procedures. However, looking at its speedy global development, I argue that external voting is taking a different meaning for both sending and receiving societies in the era of globalization. Drawing on different examples from Europe, Latin America and Africa, and comparing the early development of external voting legislations with contemporary processes that lead to the enfranchisement of citizens abroad, I argue that the enfranchisement of citizens abroad is now part of a larger state strategy of developing external citizenship in order to capture what some scholars call the “diaspora resource”. For receiving states, I show through two case studies that the development of foreign electoral campaigns on their territory still triggers classic Westphalian fears of dual loyalties of immigrants. Nonetheless, I show that under specific circumstances, external voting can also be perceived by receiving states an opportunity to capture the votes of citizens enfranchised in both the sending and receiving societies.