Migrants’ intention to vote in two countries, one country, or neither

ABSTRACT

While most electoral behavior affects politics in just one political community, migrant voters may affect turnout rates in two: the countries of origin and residence. Considering this context, we evaluate individual-level intentions to vote in national elections, as an emigrant for origin-country elections and as an immigrant in the residence country. Examining South-South migrants, our dataset comprises 1,477 respondents from an online survey during Chile’s 2017 presidential election; 94.7% are from Latin American countries, meaning most also hold external voting rights. Chile automatically registers immigrants in the electorate for multilevel elections after a five-year residence; we find many respondents are ill-informed about this, but those who know they can vote show higher probabilities of being an immigrant voter (they vote only in the residence country) or a dual transnational voter (they vote in both countries). Being interested in politics also increases the decision to vote in not just one but two countries. Longer intention to stay increases immigrant and dual transnational voting, while decreases emigrant voting. We also find that high self-reported discrimination is conducive to participating only in origin-country elections.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants at the 2019 IMISCOE General Conference at Malmö University and at the 2018 conference on Transnationalism, Integration and Citizenship of Peace Research Institute at Oslo (PRIO) for valuable comments on earlier drafts. We are particularly grateful to Marta Erdal Bivand, Monica Gerber Plüss, Marie Labussière, Jay McCann, Carlos Meléndez, Pau Palop-García, Maarten Vink, and Daniela Vintila.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Servel (Chile’s Electoral Service) data show immigrant voters’ nationality, but no information on their migrant profiles nor their intention to vote in origin-country elections. Further data from regional cross-national surveys do not capture migrant voting behavior.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FONDECYT, Grant Number: [1161262].