a b s t r a c tIn 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.

The right to vote has always been the central privilege of citizenship. Its extension to resident migrants holds a promise of democratizing citizenship by bringing it closer to principles with deep roots in liberal and republican traditions, and further away from particularistic understandings that reduce citizenship to nationality. This article's main contribution is a systematic and policy-relevant discussion of the kind of enfranchisement that can realize that potential, approached in three steps: first, a demarcation of citizenship policy within migration policy substantiates the need to employ a normative perspective; second, a description of the trend of enfranchisement of non-citizens provides the normative paper with a sound empirical base for a non-ideal discussion; third, a discussion of different kinds of enfranchisement tackles the controversial issues related to it and delineates the specific requisites to realize its potential.The policy of extending voting rights to non-citizen resident migrants (henceforth denizens) 1 confirms basic principles of democratic rule in political communities that experience high immigration. Certainly, denizens' lack of access to formal channels of political participation is at odds with basic principles of democratic theory in their formulations of affectedness, self-rule and inclusion: what concerns all should be approved by all; no-taxation-without-representation; no person should be subject to political decisions for long periods of time without being able to influence them in a formal way. Some argue that the political inclusion of all residents in a polity 2 improves governance through more genuine representation of the resident population in policy-making and is actually required as long as laws and policies of democratic states apply not only to the citizens of states but to all residents of those states (see Munro, 2008). Yet the extension of voting rights (hereafter enfranchisement) to denizens is more than a policy that may enhance democracy: it bears on principles, deeply rooted in liberal and republican traditions of citizenship, that are open to interpretation and controversial. A rigorous assessment of enfranchisement's potential as a policy to democratize the migrant receiving-polity can only be guided by an informed look at its empirical reality.Migration policy and citizenship policy are closely related, but they are not the same. Immigration policy, in particular, concerns problems that may be defined in demographic, economic and political terms and covers policy instruments from visa regulations and border control to the rights accorded to immigrants once in the territory. Justifications about numbers, quotas or "critical mass" to protect liberal politics fit easily under the umbrella of immigration policy. Citizenship policy, however, is a much more sensitive policy field because it is related to the ideal contract that legitimizes political rule and is therefore embedded in normative controversies regarding how the demos is defined. For instance, ...

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.

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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.

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