Attitudes towards External Voting: Case Study of Colombia

• In Event: Electoral Behavior and Political Participation of Immigrants

Abstract

Should emigrants participate in home elections? In an era of increasing mobility and migration, the subject of external voting has been debated not only among normative political theorists, but also among citizens of many democracies. The most contentious issue for political theorists has been the democratic legitimacy of external voting and the issues of legitimacy that may arise from extending the franchise to permanent non-resident citizens in home-country elections. Despite the lively debate among political theorists, relatively little is known about how citizens living in their home country perceive the extension of voting rights to emigrants. The goal of this study is to engage in further dialogue with the concerns that have been raised in the normative literature on external voting by examining how such voting affects perceived election legitimacy among at home voters. This study theorizes that when external voting poses an external determination threat to the results of the election, then at home voters will question the election’s legitimacy and take political stances that favor limiting the enfranchisement of citizens living abroad. We hypothesize that (1) the external threat presented by the size of the electorate abroad, and (2) the differences in preferences between the electorate at home and the electorate abroad, influence the perceived legitimacy of elections and the willingness of at home voters to extend the right to vote to emigrants. We test this theory within the context of Colombian politics. We test our hypotheses through a survey experiment that manipulates the threat that external voters pose by potentially determining the result of an election. We propose five treatments and a control in which the preferences and size of the electorate abroad are varied and made more or less salient. Our control group item simply mentions the 2022 election and highlights the results without mentioning external voting. Our first treatment adds that citizens living abroad were eligible to vote and that they had different presidential candidate and policy preferences than citizens living in Colombia. Our second treatment mentions that citizens living abroad had similar preferences to those at home. Our third treatment does not mention the preferences of citizens living abroad but instead simply highlights the numerical quantity of external voters relative to the margin by which the election was decided. Our fourth treatment combines our first and third treatment. Finally, our fifth treatment combines our second and third treatment. Using original survey experiment data of 2000 participants, we find that participants who were exposed to the threat scenarios were less likely to view the election results as legitimate and less willing to extend voting rights to emigrants.

Authors

• Jair Moreira, University of Pennsylvania

• Hyo-Won Shin, University of Central Arkansas

• Matthew S. Winters, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Cara Wong, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign