African states,global migration,and transformations in citizenship politics

Over the past three decades, relations between African emigrants and their home-states have been changing from antagonism to attempts to embrace and structure emigrant behaviors. This transformation in the conception of emigration and citizenship has hardly been interrogated by the growing scholarship on African and global migrations. Three of the most contentious strategies to extend the frontiers of loyalty of otherwise weak African states, namely dual citizenship or dual nationality, the right to vote from overseas, and the right to run for public office by emigrants from foreign locations are explored. Evidence from a wide range of African emigration states suggests that these strategies are neither an embrace of the global trend toward extra-territorialized states and shared citizenship between those at ‘home’ and others outside the state boundaries, nor are they about national development or diaspora welfare. Instead, they seem to be strategies to tap into emigrant resources to enhance weakened state power. The study interrogates the viability and advisability of emigrant voting and political participation from foreign locations, stressing their tendency to destabilize homeland political power structures, undermine the nurturing of effective diaspora mobilization platforms in both home and host states, and export homeland political practices to diaspora locations.     

Broadcasting party information: Can the introduction of community radio reduce the effective number of parties?

The introduction of a more majoritarian electoral system is expected to result in the consolidation of a party system as predicted by institutionalists. However, voters must have information on party viability and be able to coordinate with other voters within a constituency for an electoral system reform to have the expected outcome. I argue that the introduction of independent local radio frequencies can promote party consolidation by enabling coordination on viable candidates because of better information that becomes common knowledge. The effective number of parties (ENEP) is expected to be lower in constituencies where a larger proportion of voters listen to local radio. To test this hypothesis, access to television signals is used as an instrument for radio listening behavior to address potential reverse causality. Using 2SLS, I find that an increase in one standard deviation in regular radio listening is associated with a decrease of 0.42 ENEP in Thailand.     

Purifying Suffrage: The Conservative Attack on Voter Registration in Pre-Violencia Colombia

This article aims to contribute to the new electoral history by examining a specific practice of democracy, the voter registration card, known in Colombia as the citizenship card (cédula). After pursuing the themes of electoral reform and universal suffrage in a broader sense, the article outlines the card's history from its inception in 1929 to its role in the polemics over electoral corruption by the Conservative Party, which ranged over the period before the Violencia. While national-level politics are emphasised, the impact of the card at the municipal level also is suggested, as the critical link between the national and the local.     

Emigrant external voting in Central-Eastern Europe after EU enlargement

The European Union's Eastern Enlargement of 2004–2007 triggered a large wave of migration. While the influence of Central-Eastern European (CEE) migrants on Western European politics has been studied, the impact of outward migration and political remittances “sent” by expatriates remain unexplored, despite the salience of democratic backsliding and populist politics in the region. We ask how external voting among migrants differs from electoral results in homelands over time, drawing on an original dataset gathering voting results among migrants from six CEE countries in fifteen Western European host countries. Using models estimated with Bayesian ordinary least squares regression, we test three hypotheses: two related to the disparity of diaspora votes from homeland party systems over time; and one to the ideological leanings of diasporas. We observe a growing discrepancy and note that diaspora votes follow the ideological fluctuations in the country of origin but distort it, with CEE migrants voting for more liberal and more economically right-wing parties than voters ‘at home’.