Living abroad, voting as if at home? Electoral motivations of expatriates

The share of voters participating in national elections from abroad is evergrowing. Despite this, expatriates constitute one of the most understudied groups of electors. Some existing analyses have shown that expatriates support different parties than voters residing at home. However, the reasons for this effect remain in the dark. In this article, we test common electoral theories—socio-structural, socio-psychological, and issue voting—and their relevance for voters at home and abroad. Additionally, we test if differences in voting behaviour are due to compositional or behavioural reasons. In line with previous studies, we show that expatriates support other parties, in the Swiss case left parties, than voters at home. We further show that this gap cannot be explained by the different composition of the expatriate community but rather by their different behavioural motivations. Expatriates more often base their vote choice on their social class and religious beliefs. Partisanship voting and, to some extent, issue voting are less important in the expatriate community. The findings are based on the Swiss National Election Study 2011 and additional interviews conducted among Swiss residing abroad

The dynamics of EU attitudes and their effects on voting

In referendums on issues of European integration, it is often unclear how important attitudes toward Europe are and whether these attitudes change during the campaign. Extant research showing the importance of EU attitudes particularly in salient and contested referendums has often had to rely on static data and limited conceptualizations of EU attitudes. This potentially underestimates the role of (different types of) EU attitudes and hampers the ability to assess the dynamics of them. For the analysis of dynamics in EU attitudes, we mainly rely on pre- and post-waves for the Dutch Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement referendum, which extends a panel study leading back to the EP14 elections. This allows us to assess both long-term changes of EU attitudes since the last EP elections and also during the referendum campaign. We examine the effect of campaign-induced attitude changes for the referendum vote, while controlling for other relevant determinants. Our findings first show significant changes in EU attitudes during the referendum campaign, and second, highlight the relevance of some of these changes for the referendum vote. Both strengthening and especially emotional attitudes play respective significant roles, with the latter being in part dependent on media exposure