 Voting from abroad: Assessing the impact of local turnout on migrants’ voting behaviorDivya Dev, Rubén Poblete-Cazenave and Alessandro Toppeta Journal of Comparative Economics, 2024, vol. 52, issue 3, 663-678 Abstract: Over 150 countries have laws allowing expatriate citizens to vote in their country of origin. Yet, little is known about their voting behavior and how this is affected by their host countries. Using unique micro-data on Chilean expatriates living in Europe and exploiting increases in the cost of voting caused by rainfall during the 2014 European Parliament election day in districts where Chileans reside, we show that 1 percentage point increase in the host-country local turnout decreases expatriates’ electoral participation in their home-country elections by nearly 1 percentage point. The result is driven by expatriates who were better integrated in the host-country societies. Evidence from surveys shows that higher host turnout promotes expatriates’ participation in host-country organizations and less in home-country organizations. Overall, our results suggest that in communities with high-political participation, migrants engage more with the local politics at the expense of their home-country politics. Keywords: Migration; Elections; Voting; Turnout; Expatriates; Assimilation; Rainfall (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jcecon:v:52:y:2024:i:3:p:663-678 DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2024.05.001 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Comparative Economics is currently edited by D. Berkowitz and G. Roland More articles in Journal of Comparative Economics from Elsevier |
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