Institutional Representation of Emigrants in their States of Origin: How much Presence from Abroad?

This thesis addresses the issue of political representation of emigrants in their states of origin. Focusing on the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) region, it analyzes the institutional mechanisms by which homelands allow their emigrants to participate in their institutions and asks why states of origin have adopted such mechanisms. While the core of the thesis is empirical, there is a normative interest that guides the thesis: should emigrants be represented in their states of origin? And if so, how much presence shall be allowed from abroad? The theoretical framework of the thesis builds upon the literature on political representation and the literature on political transnationalism. The dissertation follows a cumulative logic developed over four journal articles that provide the empirical basis needed to answer the main research questions. These four papers combine different sources of information (e.g. legal texts, legislative speeches, and interviews) and a diverse set of methods (e.g. quantitative text analysis, regression analyses, and case studies). The findings reveal that emigrants are present in their homelands through two main mechanisms of representation. The first is the legislative, which facilitates the participation from abroad in homeland legislative elections by either voting or by running as candidates. Emigrants can run as candidates from districts located within the territorial boundaries of the states of origin (i.e. general representation) or through external districts (i.e. special representation). The second mechanism is the consultative one, which enables the representation of non-resident citizens through emigrant advisory boards. Both have been adopted in the LAC region. Yet, states have developed different ‘systems’ of emigrant representation which range from the total absence of emigrant political representation to an integrated model that combines both mechanisms of representation and maximizes the possibilities of political representation for non-resident citizens. Moving beyond a static assessment of the mechanisms of representation, the study also analyzes their adoption as a process that extends over time and in which it is possible to differentiate stages. Furthermore, the findings show the importance of studying the specific regulations of the mechanisms of representation. As a result, the thesis challenges the widely held claim that external voting has been diffused all across the region. It argues that the trend towards convergence does not exist when the concrete regulations of external voting (e.g. in which elections emigrants can participate, from where and with which methods of voting) are factored in. Complementing the broad regional perspective, the thesis presents a more detailed analysis of two countries (Ecuador and Colombia) that have special seats for emigrant parliamentarians. The analyses reveal that emigrant members of the parliament (EMPs) in Ecuador and Colombia do dedicate more time and resources to represent the interests of emigrants in the legislative chambers than non-emigrant members of the parliament (NEMPs). However, the data clearly shows that salience of emigrant-related issues is higher in Ecuador, a country that has proportional emigrant representation, than in Colombia, a country in which non-resident citizens are under-represented. This finding shows that parliamentarian representation can have a ‘containment effect’ rather than being an effective way of representation if the number of seats allocated to emigrants is disproportionally low in comparison to the share of emigrants in the total population. The empirical evidence of the thesis helps to address the normative concerns around the representation of emigrants in their homelands. To overcome the pitfalls of both under- and over-representation of emigrants in their homelands, a combination between both mechanisms of representation emerges as the most appropriate option

Do Diaspora Engagement Policies Endure? An Update of the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX) to 2017

How states of origin regulate the rights, obligations, and services they extend to their emigrants has remained mostly in the shadows of migration policy research. We have tackled this gap in the literature by advancing the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX), which was designed for comparing the degree of adoption of emigrant policies - also called 'diaspora-engagement policies' - across countries in a whole region and, with the update provided in this paper, for the first time in a longitudinal direction. Having previously introduced the EMIX in a synchronic frame, this article presents its scores for 14 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean in 2015 and 2017. This effort already shows that some emigrant policies (e.g. citizenship policies) endure more than others (e.g. social policies). These suggestive findings support the need to compile not only cross-national, but also longitudinal datasets on these policies

Diaspora policies in comparison: an application of the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX) for the Latin American and Caribbean region

In this paper we present the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX), an index that summarizes the emigrant policies developed by 22 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) states. In recent decades sending states have increasingly adopted policies to keep economic, political or social links with their emigrants. These "emigrant policies" vary in scope and nature between different countries and include measures as diverse as dual citizenship policies, programs to stimulate remittances, the right to vote in the home country from abroad, and the creation of government agencies to administer emigrant issues. The EMIX proposes a useful tool to condense and compare a wide spectrum of policies across countries. Its development involved the collection of official data, as well as a critical review of secondary literature and input from experts as complementary sources. Through a rigorous framework for constructing the index, we show how emigrant policies can be aggregated to measure the overall degree and volume of emigrant policies in LAC states. The results of the EMIX portray a region that has indeed made serious efforts to assist their diaspora in the states of reception and to encourage their involvement in the political, economic and social fabric in the states of origin. The results, however, also reveal great variation in the emigrant policies and the administrative setting adopted by LAC states

Passed, regulated, or applied? The different stages of emigrant enfranchisement in Latin America and the Caribbean

When are emigrants really enfranchised? Lengthy lags exist between some reforms that de jure introduced external voting and their application. In the blooming literature on emigrant enfranchisement, these lags remain unexplained. We argue that this hampers our understanding of enfranchisement processes as having different legal and political stages. With data on Latin American and Caribbean states since 1965 until the present, we investigate why some states in this region have delayed the regulation and application of external franchise while others have implemented it right after enactment. We propose hypotheses to understand these reforms as episodes marked by different contexts, engineered by different agent coalitions and embedded into larger processes of political change. In particular, we suggest that enfranchisement processes are composed of three stages: enactment, regulation, and first application. Our findings suggest that the process of adoption of external voting is shaped by the legal mechanism of enactment and the stability of political coalitions

Ausentes, pero representados: mecanismos institucionales de representación de emigrantes en América Latina y el Caribe

Este trabajo, partiendo del marco brindado por los estudios sobre transnacionalismo y representación política, investiga dos de los mecanismos institucionales que 22 Estados de América Latina y el Caribe han diseñado para incorporar en su proceso político a sus emigrantes - la reserva de puestos en cámaras legislativas y los consejos consultivos. El análisis revela que únicamente la mitad de los Estados de la muestra cuentan con algún mecanismo de representación institucional de emigrantes.This paper, using the framework provided by studies on transnationalism and political representation, analyzes the institutional mechanisms that 22 states of Latin America and the Caribbean have designed to formally incorporate emigrants into their political process - reserved seats in their legislative chambers and advisory boards. This analysis reveals that almost half of the states included in the sample do have a mechanism of institutional representation for emigrants

¿Retorno o remesas? Políticas económicas de los Estados de Latinoamérica y el Caribe hacia su diáspora

Las explicaciones sobre por qué los migrantes retornan a sus países de origen tienden a centrarse en factores de nivel micro o macro: desde considerar la decisión como una elección individual (la perspectiva de la economía neoclásica) ó como una estrategia familiar (el punto de vista de la nueva economía de la migración laboral) hasta asumir que está determinada por condiciones estructurales de los países receptores o de origen (es decir, por los ciclos económicos, las diferencias salariales, etc.). Muy poco sabemos, sin embargo, sobre cómo los Estados de origen combinan distintas opciones de políticas hacia los emigrantes para establecer vínculos económicos con ellos, desde las remesas hasta el retorno. Empleando un conjunto de datos originales, correspondientes a países de América Latina y el Caribe, brindamos un panorama descriptivo inicial que resalta las opciones que los Estados escogen respecto a este tema y, especialmente, comparamos políticas correspondientes al retorno con otras políticas económicas dirigidas a los emigrantes. Ello permite detectar políticas de retorno que a menudo son omitidas en estudios comparativos de las políticas frente a la diáspora y que constituyen algunas de las que los Estados de origen desarrollan como parte de sus estrategias económicas. Este primer intento de análisis descriptivo pone las bases para la exploración de los vínculos causales que subyacen al desarrollo de políticas de la diáspora dentro del ámbito de las políticas económicas

Going global : opportunities and challenges for the development of a comparative research agenda on citizenship policies at the global level

Thanks to the work undertaken by different research teams (GLOBALCIT, MACIMIDE, MIPEX…), data on citizenship policies are becoming available on a wide range of countries worldwide. The collection of these data makes it possible to develop new comparative research frameworks that go beyond the dominant European/Western-centred perspective that we find in traditional citizenship studies. The development of cross-regional comparative frameworks allows testing the generalisability of explanations for policy-variations more comprehensively and contributes to formulating new hypotheses and theories to account for both convergences and divergences across time and space. However, the need to adapt concepts and measurement tools to the different realities of citizenship at the global level raises important challenges. Drawing on the workshop ‘Going Global: Opportunities and Challenges for the Development of a Comparative Research Agenda on Naturalisation Policies at the Global Level’ that was convened in 2021 at the Robert Schuman Centre, under the framework of the Global Citizenship Governance programme, contributors to this working paper have been invited to reflect on the promises and difficulties that the articulation of a global comparative perspective in citizenship studies involves. Two main recommendations for the advancement of a comparative agenda at the global level stand out from this symposium: the first is to accommodate as much as possible the specificities of each context within the construction of comparative frameworks; the second is to acknowledge the biases and limitations of the perspective that we take as researchers. It therefore emerges that in order to make a distinct contribution to scholarly knowledge by expanding the geographical scope of their investigations, citizenship scholars need to address the challenge of comparability.This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 716350)

Contained or represented? The varied consequences of reserved seats for emigrants in the legislatures of Ecuador and Colombia

Abstract The legislatures of Colombia and Ecuador have reserved seats for their non-resident citizens (emigrants). This paper analyses the relationship between the formal, descriptive, and substantive dimensions of emigrant representation in their homeland legislatures. The analysis compares the legislative work of emigrant MPs (EMPs) with the legislative work of non-emigrant MPs (NEMPs) in Ecuador and Colombia. It presents a mixed methods approach that combines a quantitative text analysis based on an original dataset –composed of 35,446 floor speeches– with in-depth interviews with six EMPs. The results show that emigrant-related issues are significantly more salient in the legislature of Ecuador and Colombia suggesting that the effect of emigrant-reserved seats is correlated to the size of the external district. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that EMPs have a ‘mixed agenda’ composed by emigrant and domestic-related issues. Finally, the article shows that the probability of classifying a speech as emigrant-related increases when it is given by an EMP and not a NEMP. This effect is stronger in Ecuador than in Colombia. All in all, the article shows evidence that configurations that allocate several EMPs are more efficient in achieving substantive representation

Migration Policies in Hungary 2017-2019

"Every Immigrant is an Emigrant (IMISEM)" is a 4-year project that was funded by the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft and hosted at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) from April 2017 until August 2021. Its main distinctive feature is that it adopts a comprehensive view of migration policy. This includes not only the policies that regulate the stages of entry, immigrant residence and integration to citizenship access, but also encompasses the stages of emigration, emigrant rights abroad, and retention of citizenship. Thus, this project bridges for the first time the two sides of migration policy which both the policy and research communities have assumed to exist, but which so far have not been systematically analyzed in their connections. By collecting information on a vast array of information for policies across these six areas (three "stages" * two "sides") for 32 cases from three world regions, we hope to offer the scholarly and policy communities the resources to discover connections between the different areas of migration policy within and across cases as well as noteworthy migration policy innovations in so far little-known cases in the world. The IMISEM project was led by Dr. Luicy Pedroza. The data collection for IMISEM took place in Berlin (Germany) from 2017 to 2019 and reflects the state of migration policy at the time of data collection. This report has been created based on the information contained in the IMISEM dataset