Migrant rights, voting, and resocialization : suffrage in Chile and Ecuador, 1925-2020

Abstract

Emigrants can vote from abroad for about 120 territories and immigrants can vote in about 50 countries. Many international migrants can vote or abstain in both the origin and residence countries, making four distinct types of migrant electoral behavior: immigrant, emigrant, and dual transnational voting, as well as abstention. Migrant political participation affects democratic decision-making and electoral outcomes in two polities, reasons for which both migrant enfranchisement and migrant voting merit scholarly research. My goal is to unpack why migrants decide to vote or abstain in either the origin or residence country, in both, or in neither. I conducted surveys and interviews in Chile and Ecuador, likely cases in which to find individuals with national-level voting rights in two countries. I argue that political resocialization helps to explain individual-level migrant voter turnout. I posit resources combined with ties to people or places in one or both countries constitute a necessary condition and resources with a motive to vote serves as a sufficient condition for migrant voting. Rather than a trade-off of replacement, over time migrants change their positioning and motives to vote in one country or both countries. The case studies shed light on the legal and normative origins of migrant enfranchisement over the last century, differences among migrant voting variants, and how political (re)socialization processes help explain why migrants vote and change voting behavior over time.