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’.