Publications and Working Papers
The Extraterritorial Voting Rights and Restrictions Dataset (1950 – 2020)
OnlineFirst at Comparative Political Studies
This paper introduces the Extraterritorial Rights and Restrictions dataset (EVRR), the first global time-series dataset of non-resident citizen voting policies and procedures. Although there have been previous efforts to document external voting, no existing data source simultaneously captures the scale (195 countries), time frame (71 years), and level of detail concerning extraterritorial voting rights and restrictions (over 20 variables). After a brief overview of prior datasets, we introduce EVRR coding criteria with a focus on conceptual clarity and transparency. Descriptive analysis of the dataset reveals both the steady expansion of extraterritorial voting as well as several regional and temporal trends of voting rights restrictions. Finally, we revisit and extend the work of two groundbreaking cross-national studies focused on the causes and effects of external voting rights. Using EVRR data we demonstrate that including more fine-grained aspects of extraterritorial voting provisions in these analyses improves understanding of important political and economic outcomes.
Transnational voting rights and policies in violent democracies: a global comparison
Comparative Migration Studies, 10, 27 (2022)
In recent decades more than one hundred countries have enfranchised their diasporas, allowing emigrants to vote from abroad. Migrant-sending countries in particular have complex relationships with their diasporas, and this relationship is particularly fraught for countries with endemic violence. Given the number of people affected and the global extant of policy change, the adoption of extraterritorial voting rights has been recognized as one of the most important contemporary expansions of the franchise, but formal recognition of voting rights does not always lead to a meaningful increase in the ability of emigrants to participate politically in their home country. This article leverages a new dataset documenting the adoption and implementation of extraterritorial voting rights and restrictions for 195 countries from 1950 to 2020 to demonstrate how transnational voting rights and policies in violent democracies differs from other regimes. While violent democracies extend transnational voting rights to their emigrants at rates comparable to other regime types, they are less likely to implement those rights, and when they do implement them, they are more likely to restrict them to insulate domestic politics from external influence.
Variation in Diaspora Enfranchisement Processes Shapes Access Abroad: Evidence from 147 countries (1950 – 2020)
In the last four decades, the majority of the world’s states have extended voting rights to citizens living abroad. We argue that how these rights are initially extended (e.g. legislation, constitutional amendment) provide critical insights into subsequent patterns of implementation and diaspora voter access. We collect and analyze new systematic data which codes the enfranchisement process for every country (n = 147) that has legally extended emigrant voting rights. We show both regional and temporal variation, as well as find relationships between initial legal processes and implementation delays, durability, and inclusiveness. Understanding how enfranchisement occurs is critical for understanding subsequent variation in emigrant voter access, as well as other puzzling phenomena including long adoption-implementation gaps and policy reversals. Presented at APSA 2020, CPSA 2022.