Constellations of Access: Citizenship for Non-Resident Citizens

• In Event: Immigration & Democracy: Neoliberalism in Europe

Abstract

Over 140 countries currently extend voting rights to non-resident citizens; this emergence of extra-territorial citizenship (e.g. Fitzgerald 2000) has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention across the social sciences (e.g. Smith 2003; Escobar 2007; Collyer 2014; Wellman, Allen, and Nyblade 2023). A number of studies have focused on the conditions under which states extend voting rights to emigrant citizens (e.g. Turcu and Urbatsch 2015, Erlingsson and Tuman 2017), as well as variation in emigrant voter access (e.g. Wellman 2021) and voter turnout (e.g. Burgess & Tyburski 2020; Ciornei and Østergaard-Nielsen, 2020). Missing from this work are the factors that determine whether individuals have the opportunity to retain (or obtain) origin country citizenship in the first place. This paper systematically assesses eligibility for citizenship as a pre-condition for unlocking the exercise of it. Using the GLOBALCIT dataset of national citizenship laws (Vink et al., 2021), we analyze the relationship between variation in citizenship access and extensions of voting rights, both de jure (the right to vote) and de facto (access to voting). In addition to presenting a new typology of citizenship access, combining access to status and exercise of rights, we find dual citizenship allowance and regime type of the sending states are both consistent determinants of emigrant voter access, indicating that emigrant voting rights are contingent on how states define their demos—both within and outside its physical borders, as well as a strategy for autocratic states to shape their mandates.

Authors

• Sara Wallace Goodman, University of California, Irvine

• Elizabeth Iams Wellman, University of Memphis