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Distant souls: post-communist emigration and voter turnout

ABSTRACT This article tackles the question of transnational electoral participation resulting from emigration. Drawing on several strands of political science literature, the theoretical section explains why emigration is likely to be detrimental to migrants’ voting rates, which specific factors may affect these rates’ variation and, overall, when and how emigration impacts nationwide voter turnout. The theory is then tested using original datasets on emigration, legal provisions for external voting and external voting rates in 10 Central and East European post-communist democracies (CEE-10). The results confirm that external voting rates are much lower than domestic ones and reveal that their cross-national and over-time variation can be, to a large extent, explained by legal provisions for external voting and diaspora size. As a corollary of the weak transnational participation, emigration accounts for approximately one tenth of the fall in voter turnout that has occurred in the CEE-10 since the early 1990s.