African states, global migration, and transformations in citizenship politics

Iheduru, Okechukwu C.

doi:10.1080/13621025.2011.549707

Cited by 28 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…This suggests that in fact IDEA codes the dependent variable inconsistently and hence noisily. Yet, IDEA offers the only widely used (e.g., Brand, 2010;Gibson & McKenzie, 2012;Iheduru, 2011;Leal, Lee, & McCann, 2012), systematic measure of the concept of interest, so we use it here. 14 In any case, introducing noise into the dependent variable's measurement will most likely increase models' standard errors, thereby imposing a conservative bias on estimates of statistical significance.…”

Section: Methods and Data: Baseline Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diffusion of Diaspora Enfranchisement Norms

Turcu

Urbatsch

2014

Comparative Political Studies

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States have increasingly granted voting rights to their citizens overseas. Traditional accounts of franchise extension suggest that governments’ motivations are either political (new voters are expected to support the incumbent government) or, in the case of citizens abroad, materialist (a fortified link to migrants encourages remittance flows). Although these factors doubtless matter, they overlook the tendency for liberal norms to diffuse through the international system, as competition with and learning from neighbors motivate the adoption of relevant policies and institutions. We use large- N cross-national hazard models to examine whether a similar pattern holds for diaspora enfranchisement and find that neighbors’ recent enactment of overseas voting nearly doubles the chance that a country will enfranchise its own diaspora. This suggests a role for international norms in determining national voting policies.

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Section: Methods and Data: Baseline Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diffusion of Diaspora Enfranchisement Norms

Turcu

Urbatsch

2014

Comparative Political Studies

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“…Numerous scholars have identified colonial legacies as an explanatory variable of institutions, particularly as it pertains to African citizenship laws and migration trajectories (e.g., Herbst 2000). Overviews of diaspora voting in Africa link external voting provisions in Francophone and Lusophone countries to inherited colonial tradition (Hartmann 2015;Iheduru 2011). Thus, from Treisman (2007), I include a variable for whether the country is a Former French or Portuguese Colony.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Scholars of external voting have identified a pervasive pattern of restricted or delayed implementation following de jure enfranchisement (e.g., Allen, Wellman, and Nyblade 2019; Palop-García and Pedroza 2019). However, most have left the question of whether limited access is caused by logistical challenges or political calculations unanswered (Hutcheson and Arrighi 2015;Iheduru 2011;Turcu 2018), in part due to a lack of information about implementation details at the electoral level (Hartmann 2015;Jaulin and Smith 2015;Lafleur 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…This empirical approach departs from prior cross-sectional analyses of diaspora voting that focus on the initial moment of extension (Erlingsson and Tuman 2017;Rhodes and Harutyunyan 2010;Turcu and Urbatsch 2015), or more recent work that analyzes external voter turnout rates, primarily in European elections (Burgess and Tyburski 2020; Ciornei and Østergaard-Nielsen 2020; Turcu and 1 Numerous accounts of emigrant enfranchisement highlight the role of politicians advocating for (or blocking) diaspora political rights. These include country case studies (e.g., Brand 2010;Escobar 2007;Kasapović 2012;Lafleur 2013;Pallister 2020) as well as regional and global analyses (e.g., Bauböck 2006;Collyer and Vathi 2007;Erlingsson and Tuman 2017;Østergaard-Nielsen, Ciornei, and Lafleur 2019; Palop-García and Pedroza 2019; Turcu 2018), including sub-Sarahan Africa (e.g., Hartmann 2015;Iheduru 2011;Whitaker 2011). Yet these explanations situate electoral calculations as one of many drivers of enfranchisement alongside additional economic, historical, normative, and political factors.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Emigrant Inclusion in Home Country Elections: Theory and Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa

Wellman

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Since 1990, nearly 100 countries extended voting rights to citizens living abroad, including 32 in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the actual ability for emigrants to vote in subsequent elections varies widely. Whereas others view diaspora enfranchisement as a signal to emigrant and international audiences, I argue that incumbent parties expand or restrict emigrant voter access depending on party perceptions of political support abroad. I first leverage the multiple reversals over emigrant inclusion in South African elections since 1994 to illuminate how changing dynamics between an incumbent party and citizens abroad shape emigrant voter access. I further test my argument with an original dataset covering multiple dimensions of external voting in every African election where emigrants had voting rights from 1990 to 2015. I find a robust relationship between emigrant voter access and diaspora support for the incumbent party.

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“…As she argues, this reflects the current phase of neoliberal global capitalism whereby migrants, particularly highly mobile, skilled migrants, are encouraged to become self‐regulating agents of economic development. Diasporas, once portrayed as ‘traitors’ are increasingly rendered as patriotic ‘development partners’ (Iheduru ) or national heroes (Rodriguez ) for the new global neoliberal age.…”

Section: The Networked Statementioning

confidence: 99%

The political geographies of diaspora strategies: Rethinking the ‘sending state’

Dickinson

2017

Geography Compass

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Diaspora strategies have been at the forefront of new studies of the political geographies of state‐led transnationalism, contributing important insights into the widespread socio‐economic impacts of initiatives used to engage émigrés in extra‐territorial nation‐building. The conceptualization of the ‘sending state’ as a central territorialized bureaucratic form has however contributed to binary framings of diasporic space by failing to capture the range of interplays in and between multiple scales and spaces that characterises the formulation of a states’ diaspora strategies, their evolution over time, and their variegated material outcomes. Alternative conceptualizations of the ‘sending state’ as a multi‐sited network of governing entities disrupts binary readings of diaspora space, but it is argued here that such an approach reproduces top‐down views of political agency. The review concludes by suggesting that scholars of diaspora strategies would benefit from exploring assemblage thinking, where a sustained engagement with spatial emergence and distributed socio‐material agencies has the potential to reveal the dynamic topological connections through which diasporic spatio‐political formations emerge, endure and may be unsettled. This has implications for understanding the variegated outcomes of diaspora strategies for individual diasporic subjectivities and ideas of common citizenship.

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African states, global migration, and transformations in citizenship politics

Cited by 28 publications

References 58 publications

Diffusion of Diaspora Enfranchisement Norms

Diffusion of Diaspora Enfranchisement Norms

Emigrant Inclusion in Home Country Elections: Theory and Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa

The political geographies of diaspora strategies: Rethinking the ‘sending state’

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