Authoritarianism and Emigrant Political Behavior

• In Event: The Politics of Diasporic Mobilization and Repression

Abstract

By 2019, 118 United Nations member-states established diaspora institutions to connect with their citizens abroad. The most popular diaspora engagement policies include but are not limited to allowing dual citizenship, voting from abroad, expanded consular services, and social and cultural programs and events for the emigrants.
The earliest research considers diaspora engagement policies (DEPs) and institutions as a part of ever-expanding democratic migration governance schemes through which states become parts of a global trend of increasing emigrant participation in home-country governance and development.
​​However, some authoritarian states choose to cultivate selected diaspora groups and treat them as ambassadors abroad. In contrast, others found suspicious of engaging in unpatriotic activities abroad face close surveillance and ostracization or arbitrary arrest and detention upon returning home. Thus, for authoritarian states, DEPs can repress, extort, manipulate, include, or exclude populations abroad based on their perceived loyalty and disloyalty to the authoritarian state.
Previous research has primarily focused on authoritarian states' diaspora policies but not on how these policies and transnational repression influence emigrants' behavior and engagement with their homelands. My study asks, “How do emigrants from authoritarian regimes relate to and respond to the use of an authoritarian diaspora engagement toolkit?” and contributes to our understanding of authoritarian states' influence on emigrants and their political participation in their home countries' politics by offering (a) systematic data collection of emigration and diaspora engagement policies across two contemporary competitive authoritarian regimes: Turkey's ruling party, Justice and Development Party (AKP)(2000-2022) and Zimbabwe's ruling party The Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF)(1980-2022); and (b) emigrants' responses to these policies through direct and indirect forms of political participation as articulated in participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted in field research in the United Kingdom during the national election year in Turkey and Zimbabwe, and analysis of survey data of emigrants' political attitudes and behavior.

Author

• Fulya Felicity Turkmen, University of California Riverside