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Four Patterns of Non-resident Voting

Rights
Szabolcs Pogonyi

Central European University, Hungary

Published online: 18 Nov 2013.
To cite this article: Szabolcs Pogonyi , Ethnopolitics (2013): Four Patterns of Non-resident Voting
Rights, Ethnopolitics: Formerly Global Review of Ethnopolitics, DOI: 10.1080/17449057.2013.846041
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2013.846041

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Ethnopolitics, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2013.846041

Four Patterns of Non-resident Voting

Rights

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SZABOLCS POGONYI
Central European University, Hungary

A BSTRACT Although the number of external voters has increased significantly in the past decades,
the normative and political dilemmas of absentee voting still receive little scholarly attention. The
few theoretical attempts that try to analyze systematically non-resident political rights from a
normative perspective focus exclusively on dilemmas presented by expatriate citizens. The aim of
this article is to contextualize the normative dilemmas and practical problems related to nonresident voting, with a special emphasis on the dilemmas related to the enfranchisement of ethnic
kin populations created by shifting borders. The article identifies four patterns of external
enfranchisement and offers an analysis of the reasons behind the political inclusion of the
different types of external population. The main argument of the article is to highlight the
different reasons behind the enfranchisement of temporary absentees (including refugees),
economic migrants, exiles of past undemocratic regimes and kin-minorities. While in the case of
expatriates, the existence of effective ties between migrants and homelands is used as the
normative basis for the maintenance of extraterritorial political rights, ethnic kin-minorities are
enfranchised as part of ethnic engineering projects.

Dilemmas of Non-resident Voting Rights

According to the estimates of the IDEA Handbook, the number of individuals eligible to
take part in external voting has doubled since 1970 (Braun & Gratschew, 2007, p. 2). As of
May 2007, 190 million individuals in 115 states temporarily or permanently away from
their home countries were entitled to vote in the elections of their homelands. Similar
numbers are presented in a global survey prepared by Collyer & Vathi (2007). A more
recent research paper by Collyer identifies 129 countries (out of the total 183 states surveyed) that allow some form of non-resident voting (Collyer, 2013, p. 10).
External voting rights are present in 41 European countries. Though no international
norm requires so, in some states external voting is available not only for citizens on temporary leave, but also for expatriates without permanent residence in their homelands.
With the exceptions of Ireland and Greece, all of the EU-15 states provide non-resident
citizens with some access to voting rights (Arrighi et al., 2013, pp. 21 22).

Correspondence Address: Szabolcs Pogonyi, Assistant Professor, Nationalism Studies Program at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Email: pogonyi@ceu.hu
# 2013 The Editor of Ethnopolitics

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S. Pogonyi

Though the number of external voters has increased significantly in the past decades, the
normative and political dilemmas of absentee voting have received relatively little scholarly attention. The enfranchisement of migrant diasporas became a hot political issue as
Mexico offered citizenship with voting rights for its expatriates living in the US. Since
then, the dilemmas of external voting have been discussed exclusively in the migration
context. Scholarly studies have primarily focused on the security and equality concerns
of the migrant-receiving and migrant-sending states without paying attention to the specificities of ethnic kin-minorities created by shifting borders.
A large part of the existing literature as well as international guidelines discuss the technical, administrative and logistical aspects of external voting.1 The mainly descriptive analyses of the most comprehensive survey available, the IDEA Handbook, do not scrutinize
at all the normative dilemmas surrounding external voting or the different contexts and
patterns of the enfranchisement of non-resident populations. The few scholarly attempts
that try to establish a normative framework of external voting focus exclusively on dilemmas related to expatriates (Spiro, 2002, 2011; Koslowski, 2003; Lopez-Guerra, 2005;
Rubio-Marin, 2006; Fitzgerald, 2006; Gamlen, 2008; Owen, 2010).
Some states, including four in Europe (Croatia, Portugal, France and Italy), have introduced special parliamentary representation for non-resident citizens. A handful of
countries in East Central Europe and Southeast Europe have also started to offer full citizenship for their transborder kin-minorities. Nevertheless, the normative and practical
dilemmas of voting rights offered for non-resident ethnic kin populations have been neglected in the scholarly literature. The sporadic case studies dealing with non-resident
voting rights in Central Europe usually discuss the dilemmas of such practices only
from an internal political perspective, without assessing the wider normative implications.2 The first comprehensive analysis to factor in the peculiarities of the enfranchisement of non-resident ethnic kin-minorities is Rainer Baubocks seminal essay on external
voting (Baubock, 2007b). Only very recently have citizenship studies scholars tried to
develop analytical frameworks and typologies that account for the contextual, country
specific factors (Collyer, 2013, p. 1; see also Dumbrava, 2013) of non-resident voting
rights.
The aim of this article is to present the normative dilemmas and practical implications of
external voting, with a special emphasis on the dilemmas related to the enfranchisement of
non-resident ethnic kin populations. The article will focus on East, Central and Southeast
European examples in order to assess the merits and dangers of non-resident voting rights.
By giving a brief overview of the evolution and the proliferation of external voting practices, I shall identify four normatively different patterns of external voting. Absentee
voting was originally offered for citizens temporarily away from their homelands. The
inclusion of temporary absentees may involve some technical dilemmas, but does not
raise serious normative concerns. Second, after World War Two, a new pattern of external
voting emerged. An increasing number of states were willing to grant voting rights not
only to their citizens who were away temporarily, but also to expatriates and diaspora communities. Strong transnational economic ties between expatriates and their homelands as
well as less restrictive citizenship policies provided the normative and political grounds for
the non-territorial extension of political rights. In the case of former colonies and democratizing states, symbolic and restitution purposes also had an important role. The
inclusion of emigres by democratizing states was an important symbolic measure of democratic consolidation and historical reconciliation. Third, newly independent republics of

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Four Patterns of Non-resident Voting Rights

the former socialist federations emulated the practices of democratizing countries in a

different context. Some of the successor states of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia
offered full membership not only to their emigres, but also to co-ethnics who resided in
territories that became part of neighboring independent states. Here, the normative and
political dilemmas of external voting are much deeper than in the case of the enfranchisement of expatriates. Finally, in the past decade some states whose borders have not been
altered recently have also offered voting rights to diasporas and transborder ethnic kin
populations. I shall argue that although external voting in these countries is formally
similar to the previous cases, very serious normative and pragmatic problems emerge if
political rights are allocated for large transborder kin-minorities whose citizenship
status was not lost as a result of recent redrawing of state borders. Most of the scholars
who discuss external voting in the framework of migration relate it to the emerging consensus on transnational citizenship (Spiro, 2006; Baubock, 2007b, p. 2,394). Another
widely shared assumption is that external voting usually strengthens democratic legitimacy and accountability (Navarro et al., 2007, p. 30; Baubock, 2007b, p. 2,443). Contrary
to these approaches, I contend that the inclusion of non-resident ethnic kin-minorities
compromises democratic accountability and violates the basic norms of equality.
Two brief notes on terminology. External voting is usually discussed in a very narrow
sense and used to refer only to out of the country voting. This is probably a valid approach
when discussing the situation of temporary absentees and overseas diasporas; but it is far
too narrow in the case of transborder ethnic minorities, who are sometimes granted full
citizenship by their kin-states. Even if the enfranchisement of non-resident transborder
citizens entails only the right to submit ballots within the territory of the external kinstate, which is technically internally, the dilemmas of such practices should be discussed
in the framework of external voting (Baubock, 2007b, p. 2,398). Thus, I shall use external
voting to refer to the enfranchisement of non-resident citizens, even if the voting itself
takes place within the borders of the respective country. In this article, external refers
not to the location where the vote is cast, but to the legally external (that is, non-resident)
status of the citizen.
By the word diaspora, I refer both to expatriate groups with some identitarian attachments to their home states, and to transborder kin-minorities. Although the term diaspora
has been overused (Brubaker, 2004), even if applied in a more stringent analytical sense
we may conclude that transborder ethnic minorities meet the sociological dimension of
diasporas (Bruneau, 2010; Waterbury, 2010a).
From Absentee Voting to External Enfranchisement
External voting is a relatively new phenomenon. Its modern practice dates back to 1862,
when Wisconsin offered voting rights for its soldiers in the Union army. Though the
enfranchisement of absentee soldiers was clearly a politically motivated act (Republicans
introducing absentee voting hoped that soldiers would support Abraham Lincoln in the
presidential elections; see Ellis, 2007, p. 41), the move can hardly be criticized from a normative point of view. Soldiers on duty were the most affected by the Civil War, and so
their exclusion from political decisions on the basis that they are not residing within
their state at the time of the ballot violated the basic norm of democratic equality. A
century later, Theodore Sorensen, aid of President John Kennedy during the Vietnam
War, demanded the lowering of the voting age by arguing that the transcription of

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S. Pogonyi

young Americans without offering them political rights would amount to slavery (Sorensen, 1970, p. 15). The same could be said of the disenfranchisement of absentee soldiers on
duty abroad. This moral insight was an important reason in introducing absentee voting for
soldiers after World War I in the UK, New Zealand, Canada and in the US after World War
II.
In the twentieth century, external voting was gradually expanded so that diplomats and
other state employees away from their homelands could also practice their political rights
from abroad (Ellis, 2007, p. 42). Then in the past decades the scope of external voting has
widened dramatically, and today in several countries refugees, guest workers and longterm migrants have the right to vote as well. Although the reasons behind the proliferation
of external voting in the past decades vary from case to case, there are typical patterns of
the institutionalization of external voting.
A major factor contributing to the proliferation of external voting practices has been the
increasing international attention forced migrants and refugees receive. As the international community became more attentive to the needs of displaced persons and
refugee protection standards were recognized, it was realized that forced migrants
should have the possibility to practice their political rights, which is the most fundamental
element of meaningful citizenship.
Another important issue is the increased volume of international migration. As working
abroad became more common after World War II, the number of temporary absentees
increased significantly, and the previously rather marginal question of absentee voting
affected more and more individuals. As the number of people working abroad grew, the
enfranchisement of the absentees became not only a symbolic confirmation of equal political status of all members, but also an important political issue, as the larger the absentee
voting constituency, the greater its political power.
External voting today, however, is an option not just for refugees and guest workers
temporarily abroad. Guest workers sometimes never return, but settle down and even
become naturalized citizens in their host states. This, nevertheless, does not mean that
they cut political, cultural and symbolic ties with their countries of origin, which in
most cases is required neither by the receiving, nor by the sending states. The growing toleration of dual citizenship is a very important factor in the proliferation of external voting.
With the increased volume of international migration and the parallel desecuritization of
citizenship, dual membership became widely accepted, which necessitated that non-resident full members of the political community are not excluded from political decisions
(Pogonyi, 2011). Political rights are an essential part of citizenship, and so it is often
argued that the formal equality of all members of a political community requires that individuals with membership status retain the right to influence political decisions even if they
are not residing in their home countries at the time of the ballot. Such a provision is also
believed to strengthen the democratic image of the sending countries. One could argue that
the enfranchisement of expatriates is the cornerstone of contemporary transnational citizenship, and the main institution for migrant-sending countries to maintain ties with
their expatriates (Baubock, 2003).
In addition to the claims about formal equality, there are expressive reasons (Owen,
2011) for the inclusion of expatriates. Though belonging and its expressive value are
defined in different ways, such identitarian (Brubaker, 2004, p. 61) claims all assume
that political membership is at least partly an indication of important symbolic and
emotional attachments between the individual and the community. Whether shared

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Four Patterns of Non-resident Voting Rights

ethnic identity, common national culture or the mutual recognition of the basic constitutional values are put in the focus of this attachment, the identitarian claims stress the
non-instrumental importance of citizenship. According to these approaches, the disenfranchisement of expatriates could amount to symbolic expulsion from the community,
which not only involves material damages, but could also be interpreted as the withdrawal
of recognition as an equal member.
The technical limitations that in the past prevented expatriates from participating in the
public life of their states have also diminished. Modern telecommunication networks
enable distant voters to follow and even influence the political discourses in their countries
of origin. Transnational political participation in a distant public sphere has particularly
been facilitated by the growing availability of the internet. Strong transnational ties not
only facilitate inclusion of the long-distance diaspora in the political life of their homelands, but also enable the home countries to mobilize distant communities. Diasporas in
developed countries often lobby for the interests of their homelands. Migrant-sending
countries hope that by enfranchising their expatriates they buy their loyalty (RubioMarin, 2006, p. 122). It is assumed that formal admission strengthens the feeling of
belonging, and if members of the diaspora feel closely attached to their homelands,
they can be used in their countries of residence to represent the interests of their homeland.
The maintenance of formal legal ties with the countries of origin is considered important
not just from the perspective of normative equality and national belonging. As in the globalized world borders become more porous, citizenship is considered less an exclusive
unitary concept and the importance of territoriality also vanishes. Migrants want to
enjoy property and social rights in their homelands, just in case they return at some
point. Many invest significant sums in their homelands and keep paying social benefits
even from abroad, which some scholars consider a normatively compelling factor for
their enfranchisement.
Nonetheless, it is far from evident that expatriates should retain political rights in their
homelands. First, it is not at all clear why political rights should be offered in return for
lobbying abroad. As for the practical implications, there is no empirical evidence that
expatriates with voting rights in their homelands are indeed more willing to further
their homelands interests. One may also speculate that expatriates could be used by
their countries of residence to lobby in their homelands. Or, as happened in the case of
Mexico, the diaspora in the US lobbied for its own interests in their homeland and used
its bargaining power to claim further rights. It first threatened to cancel remittances
unless Mexico offered them voting rights (Lopez-Guerra, 2005, p. 229), and once enfranchised, they used political rights to pursue their interests in their homeland (Barry, 2006,
p. 55).
In addition to fostering the political interests of their homelands, diasporas have an
important economic role. Migrants, who in the past were often seen as traitors of the
nation by the homelands, are today seen as an asset. Though only few states impose
obligations (taxing income earned abroad or compulsory military service for non-resident
citizens; see Baubock, 2007b, p. 2,418), expatriates often contribute voluntarily to the
well-being of their homelands. They help to attract investors, invest in their home states
and establish commercial links between their state of origin and the country they settled in.
In addition, expatriates contribute to the welfare of their far away co-nationals by
sending remittances, which, in some cases, constitute a significant portion of the national
GDP. According to the 2011 statistics of The World Bank, 22 states receive remittances

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S. Pogonyi

that add up to at least 10% of their GDP (World Bank, 2011, p. 14). The World Bank estimates that the global flow of remittances in 2011 reached a total of $483 billion. Another
recent study predicts that by 2014 the volume of remittance flows will increase to $593
billion (Sanket et al., 2011). The World Bank data are based only on transfers recorded
by central banks. Calculations that try to account for the money sent home informally
put the numbers even higher (IFAD, 2007).
Diasporas often use remittances to buy political influence (OMahony, 2009; Newland,
2010) and sometimes actively campaign for political rights. They claim that the contribution
to the economy of their homelands should earn them political rights (Vengroff, 2007, p. 105;
GhanaWeb, 2011). Although there is little empirical evidence that citizenship or the right to
vote serve as an incentive to send more remittances, politicians as well as scholars studying
remittances do intuitively assume that the symbolic inclusion of diasporas by the granting of
political rights will result in greater volumes of money sent home (Leblang, 2010). It is often
forgotten that resources flow in the opposite direction as well (Mazzucato, 2010). As the
financial crisis hit the US economy, the volume of remittances slowed down, while the
money sent from home to the guest workers increased (Lacey, 2009).
Even if the correlation between the volume of remittances and formal citizenship status
could be established empirically, offering political rights in return for financial contribution is highly problematic from a normative perspective (Baubock, 2007b; Owen,
2010). As Rubio-Marin notes, tying political rights to contribution would bring back the
antidemocratic practices of the nineteenth century (Rubio-Marin, 2006, p. 132) and undermine the democratic equality of members implied in the classical conception of citizenship. Equal citizenship assumes that all members of the state have the same obligations
and rights, regardless of their social status, including income and the volume of their
actual financial contribution. One may object to the comparison of migrants to international organizations and business associations (Baubock, 2007b), but it is not very
easy to see why voting rights offered for diasporas on the basis of financial contribution
differs from voting rights provided for non-resident investors or benefactors. The only
possible difference of the two cohorts could be that non-resident diasporas are regarded
as members of the imagined national community even in the absence of effective ties
(other than investments and remittances) and their willingness to repatriate. But such attribution of belonging could only be based on an ethnic or at least identitarian and essentializing conception of both the diaspora and the nation (Brubaker, 2004, 2005). From this
approach it could also follow that those residents who do belong to the nation defined
in identitarian terms should not have voting rights, and probably not even citizenship.
In addition, if one associates formal membership status with national identity, it would,
paradoxically, suggest that those who speak the national language and have strong attachments to the culture of their homeland cannot be considered as members of the ethnocultural nation unless this belonging is validated by formal citizenship status (Nagy, 2004).
It is important to note that while the enfranchisement of non-resident expatriates is
somewhat problematic from the perspective of the home states, it usually poses no
serious dilemmas to host states. The worries that resident immigrants with voting rights
in their home countries could destabilize their countries of residence seem to be
unfounded. Traditional arguments about the alleged threats posed by dual citizens with
voting rights in two polities are mostly hypothetic (Aleinikoff & Klusmeyer, 2001).
There is no empirical evidence that immigrant-receiving states should be concerned
about migrant-sending states efforts to enfranchise their expatriates. The fact that

Four Patterns of Non-resident Voting Rights

settled migrants vote in foreign elections does not weaken their solidarity with the
members of their countries of residence (Spiro, 2002, p. 139). Moreover, empirical evidence suggests that migrants active in the public life of their far away homelands also
tend to be more politically active in their countries of residence (ibid., p. 166). Though
they have an easier exit option than citizens without multiple citizenship, this does not
amount to unfair advantage, and in itself should not be considered a reason to limit the
exercise of political rights in their homelands (Schuck, 1998; Baubock, 2003).

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External Voting Rights and Democratic Transition

Since the late 1980s, external voting has often been introduced after major political crises
as part of institutional reconstruction and reconciliation (Nohlen & Grotz, 2007, p. 65;
Baubock, 2007b, p. 2,400). In past decades, states in transition offered citizenship with
at least limited political rights for expatriates and diaspora communities, even if expatriates had not expressed their wish to return to their sending countries. In such cases the
enfranchisement was primarily symbolic: it expressed that the new government distances
itself from past injustices, and offers at least symbolic compensation for the misdeeds of
earlier undemocratic regimes. This is particularly true for countries where democratization
happened before the onset of mass economic migration. In the case of such states, the
enfranchisement of their diasporas went uncontested, as the political incorporation of political exiles had no decisive political or economic impact on power balances. Granting
voting rights for emigres who left the country because of the persecution of the former
undemocratic regimes is an important part of historical justice, democratic consolidation
and symbolic restitution (Escobar, 2007, p. 63).
External voting in Brazil was introduced in 1989 as part of the democratic transition
from military rule to constitutional democracy (Calderon-Chelius, 2007). The assumption
was that the new democratic regime should include and (at least symbolically) reintegrate
in the political body those migrants who left under the undemocratic rule. Brazilian
expatriates could vote in the important 1993 referendum, which was to determine the
type of government. Expatriates are not entitled to participate in the parliamentary and
the municipal elections, but as voting is compulsory in Brazil, voting in the presidential
elections is mandatory even for Brazilian dual citizens living permanently abroad.
In 1989, Namibia introduced external voting out of similar considerations. South Africa
in 1994 granted not only voting rights for expatriates, but also the right to be elected
(Green, 2007, p. 96). Other examples include Argentine, Portugal and Spain (Baubock,
2007b, p. 2,400). Ethnic Turks who left Bulgaria after the Shivkov regime introduced
assimilationist measures in 1984 were offered the option to reacquire citizenship after
the 1989 regime change. In subsequent elections, polling stations in Turkey were set up
so that non-resident ethnic Turks with Bulgarian citizenship could practice their restored
political rights (Smilov & Jileva, 2010). More recently, external voting was introduced in
Afghanistan (Slavu, 2007) and Iraq (Thompson, 2007) in order to make sure that refugees
and large diaspora populations have the possibility to influence political decisions, and by
doing so to strengthen the legitimacy of the democratically elected governments.
However compelling the above normative arguments seem to be, it would be hard
to ignore the role political realities play in the introduction of external voting. In
conflict-torn societies that try to grapple with past injustices, it is hoped that the formal
inclusion of formerly persecuted individuals in the body politic will not just compensate

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for past injustices committed by the former authoritarian and undemocratic regimes. There
is also a widespread assumption that the votes of the exiles and emigres will help democratic transition and strengthen the legitimacy of newly created democratic institutions
(Baubock, 2007b, p. 2,443). This optimistic view, however, should not be accepted
without empirical evidence. Unfortunately, not only the democratic opposition, but also
radical and ethnonationalist groups like to rely on the support of diasporas. Long-distance
nationalism (Anderson, 1998) may play into the hands of nationalistic political elites, who
try to mobilize diaspora groups, who are often more radical in their nationalist demands
than the homeland constituency. Sporadic empirical evidence and a number of comparative analyses suggest that members of distant diasporas not bearing the costs of radical
politics may support (either by votes or by financial contribution) extreme nationalist
parties and organizations in their homelands, and by doing so exacerbate ethnic tension
(Guarnizo et al., 2003; Koinova, 2010, p. 152). The Muslim Brotherhood relies on the
funding of Muslim migrants in Europe (Lyons & Mandaville, 2008, p. 2). Irish Americans
strongly supported the Irish Republican Army, Canadian Tamils the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam, German Albanians the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Chechen diaspora
the Chechen radicals (Sambanis, 2005, p. 312). Diasporas created by interethnic conflict
sometimes favor not reconciliation but prolonging ethnic hatred. Members of the diaspora
are often motivated only by the historic grievances and thus support radical homeland political groups unwilling to compromise (Lyons, 2006). Moreover, reliance on the financial
support of diasporas may actually hinder institutional reforms and democratic changes.
The significant and unconditional influx of money sent home by expatriates may push
developing countries into a quasi-rentier state status, which involves economic and political stagnation (Vogiazides, 2009). It could be argued that campaign contribution coming
from the diaspora is similar to the donations offered by corporations and unions. In both
cases, the donors want to influence the elections by using their financial assets, which can
be interpreted as the violation of democratic self-determination.
Normatively, granting external voting rights as part of restitutive justice at a time of
democratic transition is a novel idea. First, political rights had not been offered before
to non-resident populations as a remedy for past injustices, and thus the enfranchisement
of the diaspora breaks away from the implicit assumption that necessitated external voting.
As the primary consideration in these cases is historical justice, it becomes irrelevant
whether such external voters have genuine ties to their homelands, whether they are in
any sense affected by the home country elections, or whether they intend to return. But
as Dumbrava notes in a comparative survey of external citizenship policies, full citizenship offered for first generation migrants as part of restorative justice is normatively legitimate even if expatriates do not take up residence in their homelands (Dumbrava, 2013,
p. 11). In most cases the votes of the exile diaspora have only a limited impact on the
results of the elections. In cases where the influence is stronger, it arrives in the form of
financial contribution, and so limiting voting rights would not automatically solve the
dilemmas related to democratic sovereignty and equality.
State Succession and the Inclusion of Transborder Minorities
More recently, external voting has been introduced in countries that were involved in
recent redrawing of state borders. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the successor states of both federations had to face a twofold dilemma. First, the

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Four Patterns of Non-resident Voting Rights

situation of international migrants who left the federations because of the economic realities of state socialism or outright persecution of former undemocratic regimes. This
dilemma is similar to that of the former colonies and states in democratic transition. As
part of the consolidation process, it seemed reasonable that emigres, who often helped
the independence movements (by sending money and/or lobbying for recognition of the
new states), should be offered full citizenship. Many of the former socialist countries
allowed dual citizenship so that migrants could reestablish former legal ties with their
democratizing home countries. Others introduced preferential citizenship policies or
facilitated the resettlement of expatriates and diasporas (Liebich, 2009a).
In addition to the historical justice concerns, the successor states of the former socialist
federations had to face another diaspora-related dilemma. Both in the Soviet Union and in
Yugoslavia, internal migration was not strictly controlled. In the Soviet Union internal
relocation was even facilitated and forced displacement was sometimes also applied,
which resulted in the creation of large internal diasporas. As a consequence of the historical mixing of ethnic groups, after the breakup of the socialist federations large ethnic minorities were created in the newly independent states; while during the federal times
republic-level citizenship status (citizenship in one of the constituent entities within the
federation) had little practical importance. However, at the creation of the new sovereign
states the question of citizenship became highly relevant, as the republic-level membership status was often the primary determining factor of subsequent citizenship in the successor states. When the former Socialist Republics dissolved, the mostly administrative
internal borders became international borders and, consequently, internal diasporas
became ethnic minorities in the new states. Citizenship acquisition policies in the new
sovereign countries, however, did not always follow territorial arrangements. The restored
states of Estonia and Latvia curtailed the access of minority nationals to citizenship, while
at the same time introducing and facilitating naturalization policies to include non-resident
ethnic kin populations abroad. The main aim of the ethnic engineering processes was to
secure the ethnic dominance of the titular nations of the newly independent states, who
in some cases were only in a slim majority (Pogonyi et al., 2010). The exclusion of
federal-era internal immigrants and the enfranchisement of external co-ethnics living in
the other republics of the former federations was intended to make sure that the titular
nationality would have a decisive role in establishing the political and social system of
the new states, and also to strengthen the nationalizing image of political elites in the
newly independent states (Brubaker, 1996).
While the exclusion of resident minorities is highly problematic from a normative
point of view, the inclusion of non-resident co-ethnics is harder to criticize. First,
the new minorities created by the breakup of the socialist federations were the
victims of the redrawing of the borders. The internal migrants, internally displaced
persons, and settled diasporas that were separated by the new borders from their coethnics could not be held responsible for their precarious status. Second, the existing
preferential citizenship policies offering fast-track or even automatic citizenship for diasporas are in-line with international legal norms. Though granting citizenship en masse
for ethnic kin would be a violation of treaties, no international legal standard prohibits
a sovereign state from offering citizenship on the basis of former legal ties (including
republic-level citizenship) and knowledge of the national language.3 The inclusion of
ethnic kin can easily be codified in non-ethnic terms by making facilitated citizenship

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10

S. Pogonyi

conditional on forbears possessing citizenship or former residence in the country and

the parallel introduction of language knowledge.
As a result of ethnic engineering and the exclusion of ethnic minorities from citizenship, the new stateless minorities in the successor states of the socialist federations
could only turn to their ethnic kin-state for the protection of their rights. Two of the
Baltic states denied citizenship to resident minorities who moved to their territories as
Soviet citizens. Russians who migrated to Latvia and Estonia during the Soviet era
could naturalize only after several years of residence and if they learned the national
language. Most of the ethnic Russians in these countries would have become stateless
without external help. To avoid this, many of them took up Russian citizenship. Likewise,
Serbia offered citizenship to Serbs living in Croatia without Croatian citizenship. In such
cases kin-states argued that they had a responsibility to introduce external citizenship so
that their ethnic kin stuck on the other side of the border would not be left stateless. This is
a strong normative claim even if we take into account that Russia misused external citizenship when in 2008 it invaded South Ossetia in order to protect Russian citizens living
in the country from the assumed abuses of the Georgian government. There is no doubt
that Russia violated the territorial sovereignty of Georgia and used external citizens for
the justification of military action, but it does not automatically follow that external
citizenship should in every case be seen as a normatively unacceptable and a politically
irresponsible measure.
Even if we acknowledge that the inclusion of the transborder kin-minorities without citizenship in their countries of residence is not without legitimate reasons, we should also ask
whether their political enfranchisement was legitimate. As in other cases, the inclusion of
transborder ethnic kin was only partly due to moral considerations, and the newly independent states opened up the possibility of non-resident voting as part of their vehement
nation-building projects. By enfranchising the transborder kin populations, they hoped
to strengthen the ethnic dominance of the constituent nationality, effectively creating an
ethnocracy. In addition, the political inclusion of the non-resident population is also
used as a tool by nationalist parties to influence the outcome of the elections (Kovacs,
2007; Pogonyi, 2011).
The case of the successor states of Yugoslavia shows how complex the dilemmas of
external voting provisions introduced at state succession may be. One of the decisive questions the Dayton Agreement in 1995 had to deal with was the situation of those individuals
who left their homes because of ethnic cleansing during the war. At the time of the peace
negotiations, hundreds of thousands resided in the territory of another former Yugoslav
republic, or were forced to move within Bosnia and Herzegovina (Ellis, 2007, p. 43).
Depriving them of external voting rights would have sent the message that the international community and the successor states implicitly recognized the current ethnic composition of the territories. This would have implied that the successor states had no
obligations to reintegrate or compensate the approximately two million people (Edgeworth
& Hadzimehic, 2007, p. 163), a quarter of the whole population, who were forced away
from their homes. The disenfranchisement of individuals fleeing violence would have
rewarded ethnic cleansing efforts (Grace, 2007, p. 39). As the displaced were seen as refugees, whose future reintegration was to be recognized as an important aim of the successor
state, their enfranchisement was a logical step. As the agreement noted, their participation
in the voting should be interpreted as a confirmation of the will to return (Brett, 2007,
p. 146).

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Four Patterns of Non-resident Voting Rights

11

However compelling the enfranchisement of refugees is, voting rights offered to nonresident ethnic kin raise serious concerns. The 1991 Croatian Law on Citizenship grants
citizenship to non-resident ethnic Croats, including members of the then 800,000-strong
Croat community in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina. The newly independent state
required that the mostly Serb residents without republic-level citizenship naturalize in
order to get full membership (Koska, 2011, p. 9). They were not only to provide proof
of fluent Croatian language and Latin script, but also were required to renounce their
other citizenships (Ragazzi & Stiks, 2010, p. 6). Ethnic Serbs who fled the Croatian territories during the war found themselves in an even worse situation. They lacked republiclevel citizenship in Croatia and were not even residents in the country when the new citizenship laws were introduced, and thus for them it was especially hard to gain citizenship
until 2000 (ibid., p. 8). While the new citizenship law excluded ethnic minorities within
Croatia, it offered citizenship for expatriates and transborder ethnic kin. In order to
receive citizenship, external Croats were excused even from language proof requirements
(ibid., p. 7). In their case, citizenship entailed voting rights as well. In the 1995 and 2000
elections, these external votes helped the nationalist Franjo Tudjmans party to secure
victory (Waterbury, 2009, p. 4). In 2000, Croatia reformed its electoral system under European pressure and abolished the system of fixed seats for external voters in parliament. In
the parliamentary elections of 2007, out of 4,478,386 people eligible to vote, nearly a
tenth, 405,092 voters, were external citizens. By this year, the system of reserved seats
had been replaced with a system in which the number of external seats is not fixed
(though a maximum of 12 seats is established) and the overall turnout of external voters
is compared with the overall turnout of in-country voters before the number of dedicated
external seats is established. Significantly, the 12 seats that may, as a maximum, be allocated to representatives of external citizens outnumber the eight seats that are reserved for
Croatias internal minorities. Despite the reform that, in principle, reduced the influence of
external constituencies, the votes cast by the Croatian dual citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 2007 parliamentary elections were still decisive (Ragazzi & Stiks, 2010,
p. 14). This fact was established with the help of exit polls on election night, which all
predicted the victory of social democrats. However, none of these polls taken within
Croatia measured external votes, which, by the time of actual counting, changed the
balance. The conservatives, who opposed reforms of the current dual citizenship policies,
won the elections because of the votes from the diaspora.
Though the citizenship regimes of newly independent states are normatively problematic, most of the problems may go away during the process of democratic and geopolitical consolidation. The citizenship dilemmas of transition are transitional themselves,
although sometimes the price is that ethnic minorities become significantly smaller and
the ethnic composition of the state becomes more homogenous. The inclusion of the
new minorities is in many cases helped by the proactive stance of the international community. The European Union has had a particularly effective role in standardizing citizenship legislation, as happened in the case of the Baltic states and Croatia.
Non-resident Citizenship and Transnational Nationalism
The fourth wave of external voting right reforms has occurred in countries whose borders
have not been changed recently. Some of these states went through democratic transition,
which, as in the above cases, initiated the reinclusion of emigres who had left under the

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S. Pogonyi

former authoritarian regimes. But in these cases, as opposed to other democratizing states,
not only expatriates, but also transborder ethnic kin-minorities without residence were
offered citizenship including voting rights. The inclusion of non-resident ethnic kin formally emulated the practices of the newly created (or restored) successor states of the
former socialist federations, with the important difference that in these cases borders
had been redrawn more than a half century prior to the proposed inclusion of transborder
accidental diasporas (Brubaker, 2000). Although non-resident citizenship was usually on
the agenda of nationalist parties in the successor states of Yugoslavia, in those cases there
were at least some valid reasons that could validate the political inclusion of transborder
ethnic kin-minorities. But in the case of Hungary, Romania and Italy, there seems to be no
such rationale to offer citizenship for diasporas.
The borders of Hungary and Romania were changed after World War I and World War
II; nevertheless, these countries started massive nation-building processes after the fall of
the Soviet bloc. In these cases extending citizenship was framed as historical restitution
(Iordachi, 2009; Liebich, 2009a). As the newly independent states of the former Soviet
Union and Yugoslavia, these countries claimed to remedy past injustices by including
former citizens and their descendants who lost their membership because of the redrawing
of the borders, which, eventually, had taken place more than half a century before. As in
the case of the successor states of the former socialist federations, external citizenship
often entailed political rights as well.
These cases are both normatively and practically even more ambiguous than citizenship
offered by newly independent states to non-resident diasporas. Romania and Hungary
have significantly expanded the size of the potential citizenry of the homeland state by
removing residence requirements. Where the enfranchisement of transborder ethnic kinminorities altered electoral balances, a tacit assumption of external voting norms came
to the fore. Scholars arguing in favor of the normative necessity of external voting
usually assume that the non-resident constituency will have no significant impact on electoral balances (Martin, 2003, p. 13; Koslowski, 2003, p. 178; Spiro, 2002, p. 138;
Baubock, 2007b, p. 2,401). The Council of Europe comparative report on Link
Between Europeans and Their Countries4 also notes that external voting is usually
allowed in countries where turnout is low among external voters, and thus non-residents
have little effect on the outcome. In the case of migrants, the percentage of eligible external voters is indeed relatively low compared with the resident population, and they are
usually less likely to vote than the resident population. In addition, most of the countries
where non-resident citizens are enfranchised, non-resident voters elect a limited number of
separate candidates, and thus external votes have a decidedly limited impact on electoral
results, regardless of the size of the external constituency (Navarro et al., 2007, p. 30). It is,
however, highly doubtful whether normative assumptions could be based on the above
contingent empirical facts. We should not forget that there are some countries where external voters participation is very high (ibid., p. 31); and there is no guarantee that external
kin-minorities and diasporas will not became more interested in participating in elections
(Itzigsohn, 2007, p. 131). However distant such options seem to be, when working out
legal frameworks and arguing for the normative necessity of external voting, such possibilities should be taken into account. Once introduced, external voting rights can hardly be
suspended just because the influence of non-resident votes exceeds expectations.
In close elections the votes from the transborder constituency may prove decisive, as
happened not only in Croatia, but also in Romania and Italy. As in most of the states of

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the former socialist bloc, Romania after the fall of the communist regime offered renaturalization for emigrants and their descendants as part of the restitution measures (Iordachi,
2009). In addition, it also restored the citizenship of its kin-minorities living in the territories that were annexed from the country after World War II. The inclusion of non-resident transborder ethnic kin was partly a symbolic gesture of restitution, but it was also
argued that Romania provides protection and even an exit option for its ethnic kin in
Moldova and Ukraine who are facing discrimination (Iordachi, 2004, p. 241). The expectation of the Romanian nationalists was that Moldova would gradually unify with Romania
(ibid., p. 247) and the borders of interwar Great Romania could be restored (Iordachi,
2009, pp. 11, 19). The new non-resident citizens acquired voting rights as well. Many
ethnic Romanians in Moldova voted in the highly contested 2004 Romanian elections
(Csergo, 2004), and although the Moldovan constituency amounts only to a very small percentage of the total eligible voters in Romania, the external votes from Moldovan Romanians in the December 2009 presidential elections were seen to be decisive (Dumbrava,
2009). Without the overwhelming support of the Romanian dual citizens in Moldova,
incumbent president Traian Basescu would have lost office.
It is no surprise that the enfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians
living outside Hungary has stirred a heated political debate. After a failed referendum in
2004 (Kovacs, 2007, p. 94), the center-right Fidesz party offered dual external citizenship
for Hungarians living in the neighboring countries without residence requirements after its
landslide victory at the 2010 April parliamentary elections. The government claimed that
the external citizenship serves the national reunification and remedies the tragic consequences of the 1920 Paris peace treaties. Although at the institution of non-resident citizenship in 2010 it was not specified whether voting rights would also be offered, even
Joseph Daul, chairman of the conservative EPP group in the European Parliament,
warned that the enfranchisement of the transborder ethnic Hungarians would equal to
not recognizing borders, which is unacceptable (Politics.hu, 2011). The symbolic
message of the inclusion of transborder Hungarians in the citizenry has been interpreted
as the revival of past irredentist aims (Brubaker, 1995, p. 110; Waterbury, 2009, p. 7,
2010, p. 18). According to the new electoral law adopted by the parliament on 23 December 2011, non-resident citizens can vote only for the party lists. Although right-wing politicians in the past expressed hopes that the non-resident votes could help the nationalists
parties to entrench their power (Pogonyi, 2011, p. 697), it seems unlikely that the external
constituency will have significant influence on the outcome of the elections, as the number
of eligible resident voters is around eight million, and 93 of the total 199 seats reserved for
the party lists.
The enfranchisement of the diaspora is problematic not just because of its effects on the
electoral balances. If ethnic Hungarians in the neighboring countries are entitled to vote,
the parties competing for power within Hungary will certainly try to get their support by
making promises that would be financed from public revenues paid by Hungarian resident
citizens. In return, the political parties that are into power with the help of external voters,
as happened in the Croatian and Romanian elections, may introduce policies for the domestic, resident citizenry that would in no way affect those external voters who voted them
into government. Such conflicts of interest in the long run could easily create tension
between the resident and the external citizenry. One can imagine that the nationalist
right-wing parties will actively campaign for the votes of non-resident ethnic Hungarians,
which will also strengthen their nationalist image among resident voters. The left-wing

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S. Pogonyi

opposition, on the other hand, may try to mobilize within Hungary by warning against the
influence of the diaspora and the possible costs associated with offering citizenship for
non-resident Hungarians; and tension could emerge not only between the resident citizens
and the diaspora, but also among the various diaspora organizations and political parties as
the homeland parties try to strengthen their influence in the diaspora (Waterbury, 2010b).
Such clientelism along partisan lines weakens the transborder minorities by undermining
their unity. There are signs that the Hungarian government has already set out on the path
of building diaspora clientelism. The Orban government tries to strengthen its ally ethnic
parties in the neighboring countries. In Romania, the Hungarian government supported the
establishment of new ethnic parties that will compete for the votes of ethnic Hungarians
with the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania. In Slovakia, the Orban government established strong ties with the nationalist Party of Hungarian Coalition, while it
completely neglects the moderate Most-Hd party Slovak-Hungarian party supporting
the minority rights of Hungarians in Slovakia. According to several reports, the Hungarian
government also tries to influence the diaspora by channeling funds to cultural and social
organizations that are their allies.
It should not be forgotten that the expansion of the citizenry by the inclusion of transborder ethnic kin-minorities has a clear symbolic message for resident voters as well. In
the cases of Romania and Hungary, nationalist elites endorsing the enfranchisement of
transborder kin were at least partly motivated by pragmatic political hopes. By the
inclusion of ethnic kin inhabiting historical territories, nationalist parties pursue non-territorial national unification in order to strengthen their national image, which, they hope,
will earn them the nationalist votes. By extending voting rights to transborder kin, they
also hope to gain support from the newly included constituency. As the evolving Hungarian case indicates, extraterritorial vote-hunting may also create intrastate tension, and may
in the long run also worsen the relationship of the resident and the non-resident constituencies by importing homeland party politics to the diaspora (Pogonyi, 2011).
The re-ethnicization (Joppke, 2005) of citizenship by the inclusion of diasporas is
usually discussed in relation to the less-developed Central and Eastern European countries
(Liebich, 2009a, 2009b). But another example from Italy shows that non-resident voting
may also be misused in states with longer democratic traditions. The 2000 2001 Italian
constitutional reforms (originally proposed by the neo-fascists in 1955) (Arconi, 2006)
established parliamentary representation of ethnic Italians abroad (Zincone & Basili,
2009, p. 11). As dual citizenship had been officially recognized since 1992, and Italians
living abroad may retain and pass on Italian citizenship to their descendants without
any limitations, every non-resident citizen is entitled to vote. In 12 years, Italy issued
1,000,000 passports for expatriates who lost their citizenship involuntarily and their descendants who had at least one grandparent with Italian citizenship (Tintori, 2012), while
the total number of individuals entitled to Italian citizenship is around 60 million (ibid.,
p. 19). Many of those with one Italian grandparent have no effective ties with the
country, do not speak Italian and have not even visited the country. In-line with the normative recommendations put forward by leading scholars in the field (Spiro, 2006;
Baubock, 2007b, pp. 2432 2435), the Italian electoral system is designed to limit the
possible political influence of the non-resident electoral body by setting up an unproportional voting system that assigns a relatively low number of fixed seats (representing 1.9%
of total seats in both houses) to the external constituency. Despite the discrete representation that aims to control the impact of non-resident citizens, the external votes in one

Four Patterns of Non-resident Voting Rights

15

case have already proved to be decisive. The Berlusconi government assumed that the
external constituency would support the right-wing parties, so it hoped to gain votes.
But in the 2006 elections, the opposite happened: thanks to the external votes and the
inability of right-wing parties to form an electoral coalition, the center-left forces led by
Romano Prodi could secure a thin majority in the Senate and form a new coalition
government.

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Conclusion
This article has identified four normatively different types of non-resident constituency. In
the brief overview of the political reasons of their enfranchisement, I have also briefly
sketched the dilemmas of non-resident voting. In the case of absentees and refugees, external voting seems to be fully in-line with basic democratic principles. I have shown that the
enfranchisement of expatriates without residence in their homelands on contribution- or
identity-related reasons is somewhat problematic. It cannot, however, be specified after
how many years of foreign residence expatriates lose their genuine ties to their homelands,
and thus the enfranchisement of first generation migrants will always remain somewhat
arbitrary from a normative point of view. Interestingly, the enfranchisement of expatriates
who left their homelands under oppressive regimes seems to be more justified because
their political inclusion can be considered as the restitution of democratic rights.
Another special context is that of state succession. As the examples of the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union showed, ethnic minorities of the newly independent states
were often denied citizenship in their countries of permanent residence. These populations
were then offered external citizenship by their kin-states in order to avoid statelessness.
While external citizenship in this context has normative salience, it does not, however,
seem to be legitimate that these non-resident citizens were also offered voting rights in
addition to the right to enter their homelands and travel abroad using the passports
issued by the kin-states. The enfranchisement of non-resident ethnic kin serves ethnic
engineering aims and leads to the establishment of an ethnocracy. Finally, non-resident
citizenship and voting rights offered by countries whose borders have not been redrawn
cannot be defended from a democratic perspective. The inclusion of descendants of
migrants and transborder minorities in the demos is normatively illegitimate, because
these groups lack genuine links to their external homelands. Offering citizenship to
non-resident ethnic kin is in itself highly problematic, but their enfranchisement curbs
the resident constituencys right to democratic self-determination. As recent examples
show, offering voting rights to transborder kin-minorities and descendants of migrants
serves the aims of nationalist parties. In these cases, the political motivation is so
obvious and decisive that it is not an exaggeration to interpret the expansion of the
demos by the inclusion of non-resident constituencies as electoral tailoringor gerrymandering by other means.
Notes
1. Venice Commission, Guidelines on Elections, 56 July 2002; Good Practice in Electoral Matters, 18 19
October 2002; Report on the Compatibility of Remote Voting and Electronic Voting Standards of the
Council of Europe, 1213 March 2004; Report on Electoral Law and Electoral Administration in
Europe, 9 10 June 2006; Code of Good Practice on Referendums, 1617 March 2007.

16

S. Pogonyi
2. See, for example, the country profiles at the EUDO Citizenship database (http://eudo-citizenship.eu/
country-profiles).
3. See the European Convention on Nationality, ch. 1 art. 5 and the Explanatory Report art. 40-41; Venice
Commission, Report on the Preferential Treatment of National Minorities by their Kin-state, CDLINF(2001)19; OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Bolzano/Bozen Recommendations
on National Minorities in Inter-state Relations, 2008.
4. Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Link between Europeans Living Abroad and their Countries
of Origin, Doc. 8339 (5 March 1999), para. 48, quoted in Spiro (2003, p. 138).

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