Aversion to far-left parties among Europeans voting abroad
- PDF / 650,545 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 14 Downloads / 173 Views
Aversion to far‑left parties among Europeans voting abroad Anca Turcu1 · R. Urbatsch2 Accepted: 23 October 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract Recent increases in emigration and overseas voting have heightened the importance of understanding what characteristics predispose diaspora voters to support parties other than those most popular with domestic voters. We hypothesize such a divergence regarding far-left parties and test the issue positions and ideological traits that may inform it. Large-N analyses of an original cross-national dataset of European legislative election returns show that, as hypothesized, members of the far-left party family systematically receive smaller shares of the emigrant vote than of the domestic vote in both Eastern and Western European states’ elections. Still, the domestic–diaspora electoral rift is more accentuated in the East, where overseas voters are much less likely to support far-left parties than their Western European counterparts. Hostilities between ruling Communist parties and expatriate groups as well as different attitudes toward globalization and individualism may also explain this rift. Keywords Far-left parties · Emigrants · Voting · Elections · Eastern Europe · Western Europe
Introduction European governments are increasingly extending political rights, including the right to vote, to citizens living outside the country’s territory (Weinar 2017). This trend gives new importance to previously little-studied political beliefs and behavior of overseas residents, whose numbers are especially large given relatively free movement across borders in much of the European Union (Burean 2018). Several * Anca Turcu [email protected] R. Urbatsch [email protected] 1
School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, University of Central Florida, 302 Howard Phillips Hall, 4197 Andromeda Loop N., Orlando, FL 32816, USA
2
Department of Political Science, Iowa State University, 503 Ross Hall, 527 Farm House Ln, Ames, IA 50011, USA
Vol.:(0123456789)
A. Turcu, R. Urbatsch
countries that allow external voting do not count or report votes from abroad separately, creating the illusion that votes cast abroad do not matter. Still, emigrants’ views and votes are especially important because they have the potential to shape legislation and governments. Although diasporas’ relatively low turnout reduces their political voice, they have changed outcomes in several European states’ recent elections (Monforte and Morales 2018), in Moldova (Rosca 2019), Hungary (Waterbury 2017), Turkey (Akçapar and Aksel 2017), and Croatia (Kasparovic 2012), to name a few. Sometimes they even overturned in-country results, for example in Italy (2006) and Romania (2009, 2014). Some governments, sensitive to emigrant voters’ influence, have withdrawn or limited emigrant voting rights. Even more broadly, many emigrants, especially those that retain strong enough attachments to their home country to vote in elections, eventually return, so the attitudes of migrating types have influence
Data Loading...
