Citizenship, Constitutional Reform, and Diaspora Voting Rights in Africa

• In Event: Interrogations of Citizenship and Nationality in the Global South (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

Why do governments extend voting rights to diasporas? Between 1990 and 2020, 32 countries in sub-Saharan Africa—67% of the region—legally enfranchised emigrants. This rapid rise of emigrant voting rights has been associated with third-wave democratization, whether the result of international policy diffusion or increased domestic political competition. Yet these explanations fail to account for significant variation in implementation in subsequent elections. Instead, this article identifies emigrant enfranchisement as an implication of an alternative mechanism previously overlooked by the literature: the explicit linkage of suffrage rights to national citizenship. I first trace how this linkage has been increasingly codified in constitutions, with citizenship criteria and rights emerging as a central site of contestation during recent constitutional reforms throughout Africa. As citizenship has become the only acceptable exclusion criteria for suffrage rights, it opens the door for the inclusion of millions of citizens abroad. I then model the likelihood of legal enfranchisement using a panel dataset covering all 48 sub-Saharan African countries between 1990 and 2020, finding that the provision of a new constitution is the strongest predictor of legal extension. In fact, a country is at least 14 times more likely to legally extend diaspora voting rights in the same year a new constitution is ratified. This article concludes that diaspora enfranchisement is an (often unwanted) consequence of more robust national citizenship rights within an increasingly globalizing world.

Author

• Elizabeth Iams Wellman, Williams College