Policy framing and denizen enfranchisement in Portugal: why some migrant voters are more equal than others

The enfranchisement of non-citizens across different democracies has been mostly approached at with macro-explanations that propose national traditions of citizenship or transnational influences as remote causes, leading researchers to explain variation through some fuzzy balancing of the two. This article joins the more recent literature focusing on the meso-level, particularly on political discourses on denizen enfranchisement, to examine the deviating case of Portugal, based both on strict reciprocity and on differentiating clauses that divide non-citizen migrants into different universes of voters and non-voters. Such a case allows theoretical refinement of process-based and discursive approaches on denizen enfranchisement and shows that it succeeded in Portugal when parliamentarians framed it as a symbolically generous but practically restricted move that promised prestige gains vis-à-vis Europe and Portuguese emigrants.     

The grey area between nationality and citizenship: an analysis of external citizenship policies in Latin America and the Caribbean

Literature on diaspora engagement policies, transnational and extra-territorial citizenship has painted the increasing recognition of dual nationality and the extension of state policies to the diaspora as a signal of states leaving behind the paradigms of exclusive nationality and residence as conditions to exercise citizenship. In doing this, this literature tends to treat citizenship and nationality as synonyms. By analysing the citizenship policies of 22 Latin American and Caribbean states towards their nationals who reside abroad and/or acquire another nationality, we add key nuances to such consideration: nationality and citizenship may relate to different legal statuses – with important consequences for migrants – and there might be differences also between the citizen rights of nationals by origin and of nationals by naturalization. In particular, we show that citizenship and nationality interact in different ways when it comes to the preservation of rights for emigrants: the distinctions allow restricting the portability of citizenship rights for nationals by birth, and other groups of nationals, depending on the exclusivity, and origin, of their national belonging. These distinctions tell a potentially different story of how citizenship is conceived of by states as they approach the challenges of membership and participation posed by emigration, and paint a less rosy picture with regard to the demise of exclusive nationality.     

Passed,regulated, or applied? The different stages of emigrant enfranchisement in Latin America and the Caribbean

ABSTRACT

When are emigrants really enfranchised? Lengthy lags exist between some reforms that de jure introduced external voting and their application. In the blooming literature on emigrant enfranchisement, these lags remain unexplained. We argue that this hampers our understanding of enfranchisement processes as having different legal and political stages. With data on Latin American and Caribbean states since 1965 until the present, we investigate why some states in this region have delayed the regulation and application of external franchise while others have implemented it right after enactment. We propose hypotheses to understand these reforms as episodes marked by different contexts, engineered by different agent coalitions and embedded into larger processes of political change. In particular, we suggest that enfranchisement processes are composed of three stages: enactment, regulation, and first application. Our findings suggest that the process of adoption of external voting is shaped by the legal mechanism of enactment and the stability of political coalitions.