The Long Reach of US Party Politics: Assessing Activism in “Democrats Abroad”

• In Event: Party Activists, Party Members, and Intra-Party Democracy

Abstract

Dozens of democratic countries around the world now permit expatriate citizens to participate in national elections via absentee ballot. As electorates have become more globalized in recent decades, so have political parties. While much is known about the mobilization, motivations, and campaign involvement of party activists within the territorial boundaries of the United States and other democracies, remarkably little research has been conducted on the factors underlying party activism in transnational contexts. In this paper, we report findings from the first-ever global survey of members of “Democrats Abroad,” an arm of the US Democratic Party. We focus on the roots of participation in American campaigns from abroad, examining how patterns of political mobilization among expatriate Democratic partisans vary across a wide range of residential countries (Canada, England, Belgium, Germany, France, and Mexico, among others), and how these patterns compare to models of party activist mobilization in the US.

Authors

• Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, University of Kent

• James A. McCann, Purdue University

• Ronald B. Rapoport, College of William & Mary