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Postal voting intends to provide citizens residing abroad with a convenient voting technique to influence political representation in their country of origin. However, its adoption among individuals is dependent on two opposing factors. On the one hand, voting via post helps to overcome the increasing distance between a voter’s residency abroad and the nearest polling station organized by a diplomatic mission (mostly at an embassy or a consulate). On the other hand, this way of voting also requires enough trust that the postal service and designated state office will successfully deliver one’s vote to the ballot box because the result cannot be effectively verified without violation of the ballot secrecy. We examine the interaction of these two factors in an originally conducted survey among Finnish citizens residing abroad fielded shortly after the 2019 Parliamentary elections—the first occasion after Finland put postal voting into effect. Altogether, 664 respondents responded to all questions required for our specification of binomial logistic regression models controlling for various potential confounders. The results demonstrate that trust in postal voting moderates the impact of distance on one’s probability to adopt postal voting. While low-trusting emigrant voters remain largely indifferent regardless of the distance to the nearest polling station, medium-trusting non-resident citizens increasingly mail their ballots when the nearest polling station is more than 100 km away. High-trusting individuals begin to increasingly do so when they are ten to 30 km away.

Globalisation and European integration have led to increased mobility, and a growing number of countries have enfranchised their emigrant citizens. However, the political participation of Nordic emigrants has hitherto been a scantly investigated issue. This article examines which factors influence the voting likelihood of emigrants; does distance influence as a cost of crossborder voting, and how does time lived abroad influences emigrants’ decision to vote in the parliamentary elections, both in homeland and in the country of residence. The statistical analyses are based on data collected from 1,067 Finnish emigrants in 2014. The results suggest that distance to the nearest polling station plays a significant role in the emigrant voting decision. Furthermore, we find that emigrants’ probability to vote in the homeland elections decline with time, whereas the probability to vote in the country of residence increases. This study provides a new understanding of voter behaviour in globalised world, and the findings of this article can be used to develop targeted interventions aimed at ameliorating transnational political participation.

The number of countries that have adopted policies allowing emigrants to participate in home country elections from abroad has increased greatly in the last few decades. The enfranchisement of non‐resident citizens in home country elections is, nevertheless, somewhat controversial because it gives political influence to individuals who are unlikely to be affected by the outcome of an election. Despite an active debate on external voting rights among political theorists, little is known what the citizens themselves think of this practice. To examine how both non‐resident and resident citizens perceive external voting rights, we use two surveys of Finnish citizens from 2019. The first survey was directed to Finnish citizens living abroad (n = 1,949), and the second was conducted using an online panel consisting of Finnish citizens living in Finland (n = 994). Both surveys included items with normative questions about external voting rights, which allows us to compare what resident and non‐resident citizens think of the enfranchisement of external citizens. Our findings suggest that resident citizens view external voting rights more negatively than non‐resident citizens. The factors associated with these attitudes are also quite different for the two examined populations. For resident citizens more education and ideological self‐placement to the left is associated with more positive views of external voting rights, while experience of having voted from abroad and dissatisfaction with democracy in the host country is associated with more positive views among non‐resident citizens.