Eva Østergaard Nielsen, Irina Ciornei and Nicolas Fliess, MIGRADEMO team members and collaborators, participate in the 17th IMISCOE Annual Online Conference in the Panel ‘Transnational political mobilisation: linking diaspora’s electoral leverage, homeland political responsiveness and processes of democratic diffusion’.
Eva Østergaard-Nielsen and Irina Ciornei presented the paper titled ‘The role of host and home country setting in emigrant external voting preferences’. This paper analyses how studies of emigrant voting in homeland elections have questioned to what extent emigrants change their political preferences from afar and argues that the extent to which emigrant voting patterns systematically differ from home country voting patterns is determined by political structures in the country of residence and origin context. Based on an original dataset of emigrant voting patterns per country of residence, it presents a broader systematic analysis of how the host country degree of democracy, together with home country democratic development, determine the voting patterns of emigrated electorates.
Nicolas Fliess presented the paper ‘Parties left behind? How migrants engage with political home country parties’ which addresses how migrants use and incorporate political home country parties into their strategies as a minority group using a comparative research design that includes three Latin American migrant groups (Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru) in Spain. It reflects on how political home country parties present a connection to home and in what ways they serve migrants as institutionalized networks to facilitate a) accessing political information b) contacts to high-profile politicians and c) collective action related to migrant issues during inter election times. The paper also highlights the extent to which parties appear useful to migrants depends on host and home country factors alike.