![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Recent decades have seen an enormous expansion in the number of countries allowing their nonresident citizens to vote from abroad, and an emerging literature has sought to identify the factors that lead countries to adopt such external voting policies. This article contributes to this literature by examining the heretofore neglected cases of El Salvador and Guatemala, both of which have large expatriate populations and yet were slow to adopt external voting. I show that the eventual adoption of external voting in these cases was influenced by persistent emigrant lobbying for enfranchisement, the diffusion of an international norm of external voting, and partisan calculations. I also find that two factors largely overlooked in previous research – resource constraints and crowded electoral reform agendas – help account for long delays in policy change. Differences in the reform process across the two countries reflect the varying impact of norm diffusion across countries and differences in the countries’ political party systems.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Kevin Pallister is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bridgewater College in Bridgewater, VA, USA.
Notes
1 This number is based on a review of data from International IDEA (Citation2018). I exclude countries that have approved legislation permitting voting from abroad but appear to have not yet taken steps to implement it, as well as countries that only allow a limited set of citizens abroad (such as government employees) to cast ballots.
2 I use the terms external voting, out-of-country voting, and voting from abroad interchangeably. I also use the terms emigrants, expatriates, diaspora, and nonresident citizens interchangeably to refer to citizens residing temporarily or permanently outside of their country of origin.
3 Voting rights for migrants, and even for refugees, are largely outside the scope of international law, with the exception of the 1990 Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.
4 See various estimates in EUEOM Citation2009a, 4; UNDP Citation2011, 32; and O’Reilly Citation2014.
5 As Keyssar (Citation2009, 33) puts it in his work on suffrage in the U.S., in a context of tight partisan competition, if “any party or faction – out of conviction or political self-interest – actively promoted a broader franchise, its adversaries experienced pressure to capitulate.”
6 The number of Guatemalans living outside of the country is uncertain; estimates typically put the figure between 1 and 2 million.
7 All material on the constituent assembly debates is from Diario de las Sesiones de la Asamblea Nacional Constituyente, No. 111 (August 8, 1985) and No. 112 (August 13, 1985), accessed by the author at the Congressional Library in Guatemala City.
8 The TSE bill did not include a provision for voting abroad, but its introductory letter expressed TSE support for external voting.
9 Conflicting amendments on this point were introduced in Congress in 2015 and during floor debate on the final bill in 2016. In April 2015, one bill was introduced apart from broader electoral reforms to institute external voting, and it would have allowed migrants to vote for Congressional as well as presidential elections. The bill was not referred to committee until February 2016, and never came out of committee.
10 For the 2019 presidential election, the TSE only implemented external voting in four cities in the U.S., where the majority of Guatemalan migrants reside.
11 Iniciativa 4490, introduced by deputy Jorge Adolfo de Jesus García Silva.
12 The reports come from six missions from the Organization of American States (OAS), two missions from the European Union, one mission from the National Democratic Institute, and one mission from the Carter Center. The recommendations for external voting came from the 2007 European Union mission and the 2015 OAS mission.