How Do Resident Foreigners Vote in Presidential Elections? Chile in 2021

• In Event: The Political Preferences of Immigrants and Foreigners

Abstract

Few democracies grant resident foreigners the right to vote in national elections. In Chile, where the immigrant population increased from 1.2% in 2000 to 7.5% in 2020, resident foreigners eligible to vote represented 3.0% of the registered population in 2021. The rapidly growing immigrant population and the enfranchisement of legal foreign resident foreigners makes Chile a unique case to study electoral preferences among recent immigrants in Latin American democracies. As the share of foreigners who vote remains too low to allow for representative polling, we rely on data from the 46888 voting precincts (1 to 350 registered voters per precinct) to estimate the vote choice of nationals and foreign residents in the first-round presidential election in 2021. Using ecological inference techniques, we find that immigrants are more likely to vote for rightwing candidates, but there are sociodemographic-based differences whereby foreigners in higher income areas are less likely to vote for rightwing candidates than those in lower income areas.

Authors

• Patricio D. Navia, Universidad Diego Portales

• Sebastian Rivera