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ELECTIONS BEYOND BORDERS:
OVERSEAS VOTING IN MEXICO AND THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1994-2008
BY MATTHEW A. LIEBER
B.A. CARLETON COLLEGE, 1992
M.A. JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, 1998
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN THE DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY
PROVIDENCE, RI
MAY 2010
© Copyright by Matthew A. Lieber 2010
ii
This dissertation by Matthew A. Lieber is accepted in its present form
by the Department of Political Science as satisfying the
dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Date
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_________________________________
Peter Andreas, Advisor
Recommended to the Graduate Council
Date
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_________________________________
Richard Snyder, Reader
Date
_____________
_________________________________
Ulrich Krotz, Reader
Approved by the Graduate Council
Date
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_________________________________
Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School
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Curriculum Vita
Matthew A. Lieber was born in New York City on May 13th, 1970 and raised in New
Haven, Connecticut. His research and teaching focus on foreign policy, global
development, and the politics of transnational flows beginning with human migration.
His primary regional interest lies in Latin America and the Caribbean, and he has also
conducted extensive research on Europe as well as projects on Asia and Africa.
He completed his B.A. with honors in history at Carleton College in Northfield,
Minnesota in 1992. In 1998, he earned an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University
School for Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Matthew was awarded the Craig M. Cogut Dissertation Writing Fellowship for 20072008 by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. In
2009, his paper ―National Institutions in a World Polity: Transnational Diasporas,
Political Remittances and State Responses‖ was awarded the Martin Heisler Award for
best conference paper by a graduate student by the International Studies Association. In
2007, he conducted field work in the Dominican Republic and participated as a graduate
member of the InterDom project of the Fundación Global de Democracía y Desarrollo in
Santo Domingo. In 2006, he was awarded a Research Fellowship at the Center for InterAmerican Studies and Programs of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. Also
in 2006, he was sponsored by the Mexico-North Transnationalism Project to conduct
field work as a Visiting Investigator at the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. In 2006, he
was sponsored by Brown University and the Consortium on Qualitative Research
Methods to receive intensive research methods training at Arizona State University.
His publications include a chapter on the U.S. Enterprise Funds in Carol Lancaster, ed.,
Foreign Aid and Private Sector Development (Providence, RI: Watson Institute, 2006),
and he was co-author of an article with primary author Scott Siegel entitled ―Trends in
Multi-Method Research‖ that was published in the newsletter Qualitative Methods (5, 1
Spring 2007). He has presented research papers and organized conference panels at the
International Studies Association, the American Political Science Association, the
Midwest Political Science Association and the Latin American Studies Association.
Presently, he is a Visiting Instructor at Beloit College in Wisconsin. He teaches courses in
International Relations, U.S. Foreign Policy and Latin America and Global Development.
He has earned language certificates in German, Italian and Spanish. In 1991 he interned
in the office of Senator George Mitchell, and he returned to work in the U.S. Senate after
completing his undergraduate degree. From 1993 to 1996, he worked in the Clinton
Administration as a staff member in Vice President Gore‘s office and the U.S. Treasury
Department legislative affairs unit. He later held the position of County Field Director for
the 2000 Democratic Coordinated Campaign in New Jersey. From 2001 to 2003, he was
employed by a private university in Mexico City to teach courses and help manage the
first Associate Degree program accredited in both Mexico and the U.S.
iv
Acknowledgements
The major individual effort that this dissertation has been would be nothing without the
help and support of numerous others. First, a deeply appreciative thank you to my
dissertation advisor, Peter Andreas, whose input and guidance has always been smart,
wise and wonderfully punctual. He has been expert in the light but regular prod, and his
incisive responses are always dead-on. To Richard Snyder, my very, very special thanks
for a steady stream of sound criticism and enthusiastic encouragement, which
accumulated force as constructive support at every stage of the project. I was fortunate to
work closely with Tom Biersteker, to whom I am grateful for indispensable advice in the
early going. I am especially grateful to Ulrich Krotz for joining the committee and
providing his deep knowledge of bilateral politics and international relations theory.
At Brown, I have been privileged to enjoy the University's support for six years, which
begins with the Political Science Department. Thank you to all of my professors whose
lessons made their mark on a slightly older graduate student. Thank you to Professors
Schiller, Orr, Jones Luong, Krause and Morone for shepherding me through the program
with sensible counsel at regular intervals. Helping me learn and digest the new tricks
were my lively graduate student colleagues: thanks to a special group. The third leg of the
stool is the Department‘s vital support system; here my thanks go especially to Suzanne
Brough, who has been a rock, and also to Patty Gardner and Elaine Kenner.
I would like to thank Brown University‘s Center for Latin American and Caribbean
Studies; the support of the Center‘s Cogut Fellowship enabled me to complete the
chapters and present them at four conferences in 2007-2008. Professor James Green and
Susan Hirsch provided wonderful support and encouragement at different stages. The
graduate students of CLACS were well-organized, dedicated and fun to work with.
The field work was supported by the Mexico-North Research Project on
Transnationalism and by the Center for Inter-American Studies at the Instituto
Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). Special thanks go to Greta DeLeon for
facilitating my research and to Dr. Samuel Tovar at the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla
(UAP) Department of Law and Political Science for graciously hosting me during my
field work in Puebla. Beyond logistical support, my conversations with student and
faculty colleagues at the UAP enriched my understanding of the deeper social and
political problems wrapped up in the Mexico-US relationship as I confronted them in my
daily field outings. Thank you also to Dr. Tovar for taking me to the university hospital
and seeing that I received such good medical care when I got sick in Puebla.
At ITAM in Mexico City, many thanks to Dr. Rafael Fernández de Castro and Jennifer
Jeffs. Rafael‘s ability and willingness to open doors that would have otherwise been
closed helped me kick the research into a new gear, with sharper focus and more political
salience. The CEPI staff, students, investigators, and faculty supported my ambitious
project and made me feel at home in Mexico City. As well, I offer thanks to Ana Vila
Freyer for sharing her great knowledge and many practical insights into my research
topic, Anaily Castellanos Valderrama for research assistance, Gema Santamaría for help
v
at crucial times, and James Robinson and Sandra Borda for their feedback and
encouragement on my research. At the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, my thanks to
Professors Miguel Moctezuma and Rodolfo García Zamora for advising me so
generously during my field work in Zacatecas.
In the Dominican Republic, Mary Elizabeth Rodriguez at the Fundación Global de
Desarrollo y Democracía deserves special thanks for enabling me to access the institute‘s
library, resources and events. Eve Hayes at InterDom helped me adapt to Santo
Domingo‘s unique social and physical infrastructure. Edward Gonzalez-Acosta
generously provided expert feedback and shared valuable research contacts. Among
these, Arq. Henry Estévez Santos of the municipal administration of La Vega greatly
aided my research in arranging and accompanying me to nine interviews in La Vega.
Brown University and the Consortium for Qualitative Research Methods supported my
participation in the training institute at Arizona State University. Thank you to Professors
James Mahoney and Melani Cammett for reading my early work, introducing me to
qualitative historical analysis, and supporting my presentation of the case study research
to the Society for Comparative Research at Harvard University in 2008. At the Watson
Institute, the vibrant intellectual environment and the dedicated group of scholars and
staff helped me to launch the project and get traction at key moments. Thank you to
Katrina Burgess, José Itzigsohn and Robert Smith for insight and encouragement.
Geoffrey Kirkman has my gratitude for encouraging me to study the Dominican
Republic, which not only generated a paradigmatic case of overseas elections but also
grounded the research in Providence and opened it up to the fascinating field of
Caribbean studies. Thank you to Susan Costa and Zelia Silveira for logistical help and
friendly support. Special thanks to my other East Side supporters Uncle Hal Hamilton,
Professor Luiz Valente, Dr. Scott Johnston and Koji Masutani.
The dissertation builds on earlier studies: my teachers at SAIS, Carleton, and Taft have
been in my thoughts many times in recent years. You know who you are – and now I'll be
in touch again. To Dr. Michael Levy, I am grateful for my first applied lessons in political
science over a decade ago in Washington and for your support since then.
My parents made key contributions as only they could. Thank you each and all: to my
mother, for being there when I needed you; to my step-mother, for pushing me to write
my applications; to my father, for reminding me to glance out periodically at the larger
picture on our tattered earth. Academia‘s slings and arrows are real, but the community
just beyond campus offers a reality check and a reminder of the purpose of it all.
Finally, and most importantly, to Georgia, thank you for your patience and loving,
balance-tipping support. In miraculously coming along when you did, you humanized a
harrowing process and then spurred me to finish the job. Thank you for providing
perspective when I was discouraged and friendly reminders when I was distracted.
This dissertation is dedicated in loving memory to Bodine Lamont and Dorothea Jones
Wilkie.
vi
Table of Contents
List of tables and illustrations
viii
List of acronyms
ix
Ch. 1 Introduction: Political remittances and overseas voting
1
Ch. 2 Overseas voting in global historical perspective
45
Ch. 3 The Dominican Republic: Exporting the polity
94
Ch. 4 Mexico: Demobilizing the diaspora vote
138
Ch. 5 Overseas voting in Asia and Africa
191
Ch. 6 Conclusion
252
Appendices
I
A. Terminological glossary
B. Chronology: OV Institutions as a Two-step Process
C. LEND Index: Labor Export New Democracies
D. Nation-states with greatest overseas populations, top 50
283
286
287
288
II
A. Time-series output, Overseas Voting Law
B. Time-series output, Implementation
C. Heckman selection model output
D. Description of variables, indicators and sources
E. Basis for diaspora population estimations
289
290
291
292
295
III
A. Consular patronage system
298
B. Capital city residents among Mexican overseas voters
299
References: List of author‘s field interviews
300
Bibliographical references
305
vii
List of Tables & Illustrations
Page
3
4
5
16
18
20
24
27
Table 1.0
Table 1.1
Table 1.2
Table 1.3
Table 1.4
Table 1.5
Table 1.6
Table 1.7
Overseas Voting Trend
Variance in implementation globally
Focused comparison: OV Rules, 1994 – present
Overseas voting in three views of transnational politics
States accounting for remittances, 1975 – 2005
Political Remittances
Two-stage process
Overseas state structures
Table 2.0
Table 2.1
Photo
Table 2.2
Table 2.3
Table 2.4
Table 2.5
Table 2.6
Overseas Voting Trend
Six main explanations: overseas voting laws and implementation
Seminario Internacional Sobre el Voto en el Extranjero
Characteristics of voting rules
Independent Variables
Country size and OV in Latin America
Descriptive Data
Summary Results
47
52
54
67
68
72
79
84
Table 3.0
Table 3.1
Table 3.2
Table 3.3
Instituting OV: A Two-Step Process
Overseas Voting in Dominican Historical Context
Pitching for Diaspora Support
State structure beyond the territory
97
101
116
128
Table 4.0
Exhibit
Chronology of Overseas Voting in Mexico
Mexican Diaspora Propaganda
144
157
Table 5.0
Table 5.1
Table 5.2
Photo
Table 5.3
Table 5.4
Table 5.5
Table 5.6
Table 5.7
Table 5.8
Table 5.9
Overseas state Structures
193
Developing democracies with transnational politics in three regions 200
Philippines OV Chronology
201
Filipina migrants rally in Hong Kong, 2001
206
South Korea Chronology
209
India OV Chronology
216
Indonesia OV Chronology
225
Senegal OV chronology
232
Ghana chronology
238
Implementation & Participation Outcomes
247
Overseas state Characteristics & OV Outcomes
250
Photo
Outside the money counter, Atlixco, Puebla
273
viii
List of Acronyms
CENA
COAV
COFEM
COMELEC
DANR
DFA
ECOWAS
GDP
GNP
IDEA
IFE
IFES
IFS
IME
INC
IOM
JCE
KPU
MDP
MEA
NDC
NPP
NRI
OECD
OSCE
OWWA
PAN
PBD
PC
PIO
PLD
POEA
PR
PRI
PRD
PS
ROPAA
SD
SRE
TKI
TPE
UNDP
UNEAD
National Electoral Commission, Senegal (formerly the ONEL)
Committee for Overseas Absentee Voting, Philippines
Council of Mexican Federations
Commission on Election, Philippines
Dominican-American National Roundtable
Department of Foreign Affairs, Philippines
Economic Community of West African States
Gross Domestic Product
Grand National Party, South Korea
Institutional Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
Federal Electoral Institute, Mexico
International Foundation for Election Systems
Indian Foreign Service
Institute for Mexicans in the Exterior
Indian National Congress
International Organization for Migration
Junta Central Electoral, Dominican Republic
Komisi Pemliham Umum (National Election Commission), Indonesia
Millennium Democratic Party, South Korea
Ministry of External Affairs, India
National Democratic Congress, Ghana
New Patriotic Party, Ghana
Non-Resident Indian
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, Philippines
National Action Party, Mexico
Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, India
Participación Ciudadana, Dominican Republic
Person of Indian Origin
Party of Democratic Liberation, Dominican Republic
Philippine Overseas Employment Agency
Reform Party, Dominican Republic
Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico
Dominican Revolutionary Party (ch. 3), Party of Democratic Revolution (ch. 4, Mexico)
Parti Socialiste, Senegal
Representation of the Peoples Amendment Act, Ghana
Senegalese Democratic Party
Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (Ministry of Foreign Relations), Mexico
Tenaga Terja Indonesia (Migrant Workers), Indonesia
transnational political entrepreneur
United Nations Development Programme
United Nations Electoral Assistance Division
ix
Chapter 1
Introduction: Political Remittances and Overseas Voting
As remittance-sending diasporas grow in prominence, they present a complex
political challenge to nation-states, particularly in the developing world. The challenge
consists of adapting territorial institutions to increasingly global nations. Since 1991,
economic remittances sent home by migrant workers have soared ten-fold, to $328 billion
in 2008, touching every major region, surpassing total official development assistance
and rivaling foreign direct investment as a revenue source for developing countries.1 For
nation-states, the massive flows of labor export are an ambiguous fruit—unplanned and
uncontrollable, difficult to justify yet useful in relieving economic distress and stabilizing
the balance of payments. As remittances become evident in national accounts, they raise
powerful issues of national obligation and access to democratic participation.2
For many emigrants, transnational life has stimulated a desire to participate in
home-country politics as independent advocates of reform. Migrants' economic gains and
learning represent a new resource with potential political influence in the country of
origin. Abetted by liberalization and communications technologies, their long-distance
bids to break onto the scene from abroad have invigorated national politics in the
extraterritorial spaces of countries like Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Seeking a
political opening, migrant activists highlight the diaspora's economic contributions,
invoke global norms, and demand the right to vote for emigrants.
So far states have taken half-steps towards instituting elections beyond borders.
1
2
Ratha et al (2009) of the World Bank expect remittances to decline between 7 and 10% in 2009 due to
the global recession, and then to bounce back. Including unrecorded transfers leads to higher base
estimates (IFAD 2007).
See Glossary for definition, and notes on usage, for diaspora and other terms. Remittances are private
cross-border financial transfers at the household level. Labor export refers to situations with net
emigration and corresponding remittance inflows, whether home states are active or passive in
managing the flows.
1
2
Home country political elites increasingly recognize the political potential embodied in
the diaspora but remain wary about full-scale electoral participation from abroad. They
have redefined citizenship and begun moves toward expatriate voting as a part of
democratization reforms. In 1994, Mexico's President hailed the ―global Mexican
nation,‖ committing the government to incorporate overseas nationals as citizens.
However, in Mexico, diaspora impact has mainly been limited to changes in discourse,
not laws, policy or resource flows.
The question of overseas voting rules, the topic of choice, has become a central
issue in the extraterritorial politics of developing countries. The realization of migrants'
political potential requires access to public spaces and channels of decision-making.
Globally, voting in democratic elections has become the universally recognized and
legitimate means for political participation. Between 1991 and 2006, the number of
countries that had formally approved overseas voting rights grew from 32 to over 100.
However, overseas voting raises controversial issues about the format for diaspora
political mobilization, including the extent of activation, whether it is directed in support
of or in opposition to the government, and whether it is organized by political parties,
civic groups or state actors.
A global take-off in overseas voting adoption has accompanied the remittance
boom. Table 1.0 depicts the OV trend of recent decades specifically in regard to
implementation, showing the number of countries that have held overseas elections rising
to 63 by 2005, up from 31 in 1991. Global growth in the practice has continued in recent
years, too, so that by 2007 over 115 countries had passed OV laws, and roughly 70 had
3
implemented overseas elections.3
Table 1.0
Overseas Voting Trend
What does it mean to implement overseas voting– how seriously have these
countries moved to transnationalize their elections? As the phenomenon of migrant
diaspora politics has become more generalized, there has been considerable variance in
the openness of overseas voting (OV) rules as implemented. Some offer rules that favor
expansive participation, while others introduce rules that are restrictive or prohibitive.
Table 1.1 shows how in 2004 the 149 largest nation-states were divided between open
implementers, restrictive implementers and non-implementers.
3
Ellis, Navarro et al, eds., Voting from abroad (Stockholm: IDEA-IFE, 2007), p. 3.
4
Table 1.1
Variance in implementation globally
Openness to participation is a basic characteristic of democracy. My research for
chapter two‘s large-n study investigated the OV experience of 149 countries. It estimates
the openness of OV rules on the basis of five elements, including who is eligible to vote
from abroad, as well as the rules for long-distance voting, registration, regulation and
representation. The data showed that, through 2004, 23% of countries had implemented
open elections overseas, while 32% had implemented OV in restrictive or delayed
manner, with the remaining 43% not extending elections beyond the territory.
Exemplifying much of the global variance, the comparison of the Dominican
Republic and Mexico shows a puzzling divergence in the institutions that have resulted in
two otherwise similar cases. As remittance-dependent democratizers with diaspora voting
bids, they both experienced the overseas voting process along the same timeline: in the
1990s, remittances surged following crisis-induced emigration, and national legislatures
reformed the constitution establishing expatriate rights to dual citizenship and voting,
5
leading both to implement OV in recent years (Appendix I-B). As instituted over the last
two decades, the Dominican Republic‘s rules organize voting in public spaces and permit
full-scale overseas campaigns, generating significant overseas turnout. Meanwhile,
Mexico has prohibited campaigns abroad and deliberately established a complicated,
expensive voting process that has ensured extremely low participation. These starkly
different institutions form the dissertation's outcome variable in Table 1.2 and drive its
research questions.
Table 1.2
Focused comparison of OV Rules, 1994 - present
Case
Outcome
Dominican Republic
Expansive
Mexico
Restrictive
Why does the Dominican Republic adopt expansive overseas elections, while Mexico
institutes a highly restrictive set of rules? More generally, what makes a nation-state
choose to adopt, restrict or prohibit voting by overseas nationals in domestic elections?
The questions point out a continuing gap in research upon varying home state
responses to cross-border phenomena, originally identified by Bauböck (2002, 8-9). This
dissertation first identifies the global pattern of labor export and overseas voting in a
large-n quantitative analysis. It concentrates its research on the two core case studies of
the Dominican Republic and Mexico in search of the main causal factors. Before
concluding, it extends the analysis to compare six theoretically relevant country cases, in
pairs from each of three regions in Asia and Africa.
6
Understanding the politics of overseas voting requires analytic grounding in the
country of origin and a focus on the transnational relationship between diaspora society
groups and home country political structure. Findings from the global analysis confirm
that, on average, more political openness favors expansive forms of overseas voting by
enabling rights claims and spurring party competition for migrant votes. As well,
independently, more economic remittances are correlated with the same. But it is not
simply remittances plus competitiveness that determine outcomes; rather state structure
mediates political remittances. Thus, in any given case, the interaction between diaspora
actors and regime structure reveals the causes of OV outcomes.
Based on case study findings, I argue that the key structural characteristics lie in
the institutional capacities and preferences of the overseas state, defined as the foreign
ministry and the electoral bureaucracy. These two bureaucracies play crucial roles in
shaping the institutions of transnational politics, influencing whether these include
elections abroad and, if so, how accessible overseas voting is. Strong overseas states are
distinguished from weak ones by i) a greater level of professionalism of government
officials with more independence from societal pressures and ii) a greater degree of
centralized, hierarchical control over resources and personnel decisions. State preferences
can become a factor when bureaucratic doctrines and practices prioritize liberal rights
norms that may conflict with traditional state norms of territorial jurisdiction. In many
developing countries, including the two in question, states‘ normative dispositions have
not been an independent variable but rather a function of their capacities; later, in chapter
five, the analysis introduces a different type of case in which preferences become
significant and require a more complex, two-dimensional view of the overseas state.
7
In the Dominican Republic, the foreign ministry follows a patronage system:
strong political incentives lead party-linked appointees to favor engagement with local
diaspora communities as a greater priority than any broader policy of state. Expansive
overseas voting is attractive to partisan consular chiefs in remittance-sending cities,
presenting a means to develop patronage networks and tap the diaspora for funds, talent
and political organization. As well, the Dominican Republic‘s electoral authority is
divided and dominated by political party interests, lax in enforcing national controls on
fundraising, and disposed to accommodate overseas voting agenda for the additional
resources and overseas postings the charge bestows. In the absence of bureaucratic
hierarchy, party-led entrepreneurship can occur more freely.
Politics in the Dominican Republic are dominated by strong parties and other
private actors, not the government. In the aftermath of a national political crisis in 1994,
Dominican political leaders agreed on basic electoral rules that increased competitiveness
and established the right of all citizens to vote from abroad. Amidst loosely regulated
national political processes, with a tradition of overseas activism by opposition parties,
party leaders harnessed the diaspora's dense social networks and remittance economies to
build parallel party structures in the extraterritorial spaces. In the process, the clientelistic
interactions between home-country principals and overseas agents make the two sides
difficult to distinguish. The result is an expansive institution with vibrant participation:
permissive rules for overseas organization; party branches embedded throughout diaspora
society; and a consular infrastructure incorporated into political machines. Perceptions of
political opportunity spurred the initial adoption of expansive rules, while party
governance via cross-border patronage networks has sustained its implementation.
8
Interestingly, the Dominican case features a reverse flow of ideas opposite in
nature to that of Mexico, as the Dominican practice of extraterritorial politics results in a
one-way export of political culture from the home country to the diaspora. In other
words, transformation occurs not in the Dominican diaspora's intervention into the home
country, but rather in the export of domestic political practices and norms. As chapter
three details, political patronage in the consulates has led to violations of Geneva
Convention norms, outraging reform-minded Dominican-Americans but passing as
―honest graft‖ within the standard bounds of domestic political norms. Moreover, for
party elites, the ample revenues captured personally by Dominican Consuls in New York
and New England are a well understood fact and a reason to stay close to the diaspora.
By contrast, in Mexico, the foreign ministry is run and staffed by career officers
committed to interstate diplomacy, who view overseas voting as a fruitless and risky task
certain to inflame anti-Mexican xenophobia and preclude a bilateral migration accord
with the U.S. The foreign ministry controls the consulates and sets their budgets,
upholding institutional barriers to diaspora communities and privileging political elites of
the national capital. Of equal importance, Mexico‘s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) is a
vast, slow-moving Leviathan committed to free, fair and secret elections within the
national territory; it reflects the elite consensus across Mexico‘s three parties of risk
perception and aversion and enforces a strict ban on foreign financial contributions. At
home and abroad, Mexico‘s two overseas state actors have together used their prestige,
infrastructure and control of information to frame overseas voting as a risky, costly
project for party elites and the nation – deliberately influencing the content of the law.
Thus, Mexico‘s migrant organizations encountered powerful resistance, as party
9
leaders took political cues from state elites and opted for a law that barred them from
mobilizing and incorporating the overseas electorate. The foreign ministry remained the
predominant actor in diaspora cities, collaborating with the electoral authority to monitor
closely overseas voting and political activities. A binational network of Mexican diaspora
leaders kept sustained pressure upon the political class to enact open overseas voting. In
the end, party and government elites deliberately crafted and implemented a restrictive
reform. Overall, the Mexican state directed political remittances in the way that it
structured overseas participation. The foreign ministry's programs for Mexicans abroad
incorporated the masses administratively, issuing five million consular identification
cards not valid for voting. It co-opted diaspora elites, recruiting overseas professionals
and entrepreneurs to join state-directed consultative councils. Meanwhile, as a key
subplot running counter to the state-led rollout of bureaucratic structure, Mexico's
diaspora network linked up with progressive forces inside the bureaucracy to effectively
lobby Mexico‘s Congress to hold an open vote on a voting bill in 2005. In the end, the
restrictive law that passed did contain an element of migrant-led change.
What do findings from the two Latin America cases reveal about the broader
research question? The type of OV institution adopted depends in large extent upon how
the government is set up. Overseas state capacities shape the political incentives guiding
the interactions between diaspora entrepreneurs and insider elites. As the cases will show,
state capacities take effect through four mechanisms: overseas fundraising controls;
overseas organization; issue framing; and implementation. Across regions, the same four
mechanisms occur in sequence from the first surfacing of an overseas voting claim:
10
Fundraising controls: Domestically, strong electoral commissions that uphold
bans or normative prohibitions on foreign fundraising deter overseas outreach and
party-building; weaker, more client-sensitive units favor a laissez-faire posture.
Overseas organization: In diaspora cities, strong foreign ministries staffed by a
professional foreign service present a pre-existing means and venue in the
consular infrastructure for organizing the diaspora along non-partisan lines,
driving transnational entrepreneurship to state and civic sectors. Strong state
capacities also raise concerns about government manipulation of overseas voting
in favor of the incumbent party, making opposition leaders more risk averse in
deciding whether to support OV or not.
Issue framing: In the legislature, the foreign ministry and electoral commission
frame the domestic politics of the overseas voting issue when they weigh in with
the media and legislators about the costs, logistics and consequences for external
relations with resident countries; foreign conflict and hostile states are inimical to
overseas voting; in states founded on principles of nationalism and territorial
organization,4 bureaucratic actors make overseas voting politically toxic when
they invoke potential risks to state interests.
Implementation: Abroad, strong overseas state structures disposed to minimize
risks to state and ruling party can obstruct expansive implementation of diaspora
voting, seen concretely in the coordination between electoral commission and
foreign ministry. Generally, in developing democracies that have suffered
4
Indicators of such ―state nationalism‖ include strong adherence to territorial organization, national
jurisdiction and non-intervention in the operational plans of the foreign ministry and electoral agency.
11
economic crises, state and ruling party elites perceive potential opposition in the
diaspora and so tend to tread with caution there, notwithstanding the complex,
varied nature of diaspora preferences across cases.
Thus, in a strong overseas state, bureaucracies composed of a professional foreign
service and independent electoral authorities possess stronger relative capacities in
transnational organization; given their preference for the continuity of national-territorial
organization, they exert their pivotal influence to guide overseas activism away from
open OV. By contrast, democracies lacking authoritative structures dedicated to
territorial controls are more conducive to the development of open OV rules.
I
Alternative explanations
Existing studies of overseas voting fall into three general categories of
explanation, which respectively emphasize external normative influences, domestic
incentive structures and historical-structural factors. Each sheds light on certain dynamics
of state-diaspora politics shaping OV outcomes, however, none has yet to develop or
even suggest a theory capable of explaining variance across multiple cases. This
dissertation is the first attempt at such a systematic theorization. What knowledge does it
build on? Interestingly, of the three rival explanatory perspectives, the scholarship
emphasizing diaspora consciousness is by far the most empirically and theoretically
developed, whereas research applying conventional political science approaches of
rational choice theory and statism to overseas voting lacks volume and depth. On the
whole, the body of academic research on the topic remains narrow, lacking theorization
of causal mechanisms and without systematic empirical testing across cases. Against this
lacuna, experience offers useful references for theory-building. Interviewees voiced
12
different hypotheses based on factors such as population size and diaspora profiles, which
the empirical chapters test. Chapter two outlines a historical typology of national
experiences and evaluates certain single-factor hypotheses.
Reflecting a norms-based approach, the transnational communities research of
recent decades was the first to focus on overseas voting as an instance of broader forces
of global political change. The political anthropology and sociology literatures that make
up this body of work share a sociological or social constructivist approach defined by an
analytic focus on identity, normative change and social relations. On overseas voting, this
transnationalist approach has focused attention upon diaspora agency and contributed
valuable empirical building blocks, but it lacks explanatory leverage across cases. It
implies more open OV institutions than in fact occurred in Mexico.
Sociological theories of globalization make positive predictions of political
changes on the basis of underlying social change. For example, Sassen emphasizes
―denationalized citizenship‖ and argues that undocumented migrants have utilized
informal transnational networks to realize their rights in the countries of origin (2006,
295-6) and to recover a history-making capacity linked to broader world change (2006,
319-321). However, the logic of globalization theory fits poorly with the global variance
in overseas voting outcomes and calls our attention to the key Mexico case, in which
politics set limits on the impact of migrant agency. Moreover, the denationalization thesis
is misleading in relation to the political contestation spurred by overseas voting, namely
the re-creation of the national in global spaces.
Anthropology contributed the first main empirical writings to touch upon overseas
voting. Luin Goldring (2002) introduced the political remittances concept, referring
13
specifically to the ideational contributions made by remittance-sending emigrants to the
home-country polity. Goldring and several others5 explored the political implications of
transnational life and identified overseas voting and dual citizenship – topics generally
overlooked by political scientists. This transnational politics literature was part of the
multi-disciplinary research project focused on migrant communities and dedicated to a
novel ―transnationalist‖ analytic lens. The transnationalist approach is committed to
detailed ethnographic studies that illuminate conceptual and practical problems of
existing structures, including world politics. The approach is evident in the title of a
seminal work: Nations unbound: Transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments, and
deterritorialized nation-states (Basch et al 1994). The notion of a contradiction between
international capitalism and nation-state units was not new (Zolberg 1989, 409), but the
transnationalist project animated it with a rich empiricism and pointed to the OV topic.
With its ethnographic approach, transnationalist research has lacked a systematic
comparative analysis relevant to the research question about political institutions. Initial
works focus on the description of activities and remain based on single cases, rich in
detail yet lacking conceptual development as well as comparative leverage, let alone
statistical inference. Bauböck argued for a broad definition of political transnationalism
that includes not only the cross-border political activities of migrant communities but the
impact that they have upon the polity, of both home and resident countries:
This standard conception of political transnationalism is still too narrow and ought to be
broadened . . . it should not only refer to politics across borders but ought to consider
how migration changes the institutions of the polity and its conception of membership.
(2003, 702).
5
Among these multi-disciplinary works are Guarnizo 1998, Itzigsohn 2000, Levitt 2001, M. Smith
2003, R. Smith 2003a and 2003b, and Moctezuma 2004.
14
Without such careful conceptualization, the transnational concept has been problematic
when applied to political institutions. Instead, the scholarship has emphasized multiple
alternatives to national citizenship—voluntary, economic, social, transnational, postnational— along with ―globalization from below.‖ Celebration of diaspora influence has
generated criticism for suggesting that the nation-state no longer matters.6
Political sociologists made several refinements to sharpen transnational research.
Recent work by Itzigsohn points out the contradictions of Dominican overseas politicking
(2008, 2004); Levitt and De la Dehesa distinguish variance in Haiti and Brazil on the one
hand, from Mexico and the Dominican Republic, on the other. Despite lumping the latter
two together, they make a good move in identifying political costs and benefits to
established national actors (2003, 601-2). Still, while breaking new ground and
documenting vibrant diaspora political activities, the analytic commitment to begin with
the diaspora too easily overlooks the powerful domestic interests and state structures that
intermediate the new diaspora calls for voting rights. As well, firm commitments to an
ethnographic methodology taken in some works, e.g. Smith and Bakker (2007),
deliberately limit the relevance of such accounts for my research questions.
A second alternative perspective emphasizes domestic incentive structures. The
rationalist argument focuses on the preferences and strategic interaction of domestic party
elites, exemplified by Parra's game theoretic analysis of the Mexico case that identifies
the party consensus against expansive reform (2005, 102-3). However, this analysis
assigns preferences retrospectively, without questioning their origins; and in its exclusive
focus upon domestic party actors, it overlooks the Mexican diaspora network's influence
6
See Bauböck 2002 and 2003 and Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004 for critiques along this line.
15
and the broader implications for institution-building. More generally, the rationalist
literature has emphasized immigration, arguing that much will depend on how migration
is managed by the more powerful liberal states (Hollifield 2004, 905). On OV, its
exemplars are entirely case-specific, offering no theory to explain variance.
From a structural point of view, political scientists have viewed the transnational
communities research with skepticism, raising valid questions about migration's newness
and impact that are explored in this study. Migration's incurrence in politics has a long
history (Koslowski 2002), and any assessment of its role today should take care to avoid
exaggeration (Cortina, interview) and also to establish proper historical context. A large
portion of emigrants engage in the politics of integration, not long-distance nationalism,
and many first-generation Latinos show a stronger interest in access to education and
economic opportunity in the residence country than in homeland development (De la
Garza 1998). However, in my view, today's flows show significant scale and changing
organization, raising the stakes of the diaspora constituency for home country politics.
While other disciplines have led the way in identifying political aspects of such a vast
and thriving human space, political science has yet to contribute new knowledge in equal
measure. The deficiency is surprising in light of the discipline‘s deep intellectual base.
Table 1.3 summarizes the treatment of overseas voting by the three different views
of transnational politics. A structural perspective is emphasized more or less in the
writings of historical-institutionalists, government practitioners and international legal
scholars. These strands have contributed three edited volumes, identified as exemplars in
the table, with many case studies tracing the history of emigration politics, state programs
and formal OV outcomes by country. Alternatively, committed realists or state-
16
nationalists alternate between skepticism and hostility on the topic (Huntington 2004,
Carpizo 1998), instead of treating it as something that varies empirically.7
Table 1.3
Overseas voting in three views of transnational politics
Structural
Analytic
framework
Historical-institutional
Statist or realist
Legal analysis
Rationalist
Social
constructivist
Rational choice
Transnational communities
Domestic incentive
structures
Diaspora consciousness
State policy programs
Key
Factor(s)
Historical emigration
politics
Elite bargaining
Diaspora talents and
mobilization
Sovereignty norms
Calderón, ed., Votar en la
Distancia (2004).
Exemplars
González Gutiérrez, ed.,
Relaciones Estadodiaspora (2006).
Hollifield, The emerging
migration state (2004).
Parra, Overseas voting and
Mexico‘s Chamber of
Deputies (2005).
Sassen, Territory,
Authority, Rights (2006).
Goldring, The Mexican
state and transnational
organizations (2002).
Ellis et al, IDEA Handbook
on External Voting (2007).
Duarte, Political
implications of the
Dominican overseas vote
(2003).
Levitt, The Transnational
Villagers (1998).
General
orientation
&
predictive
tendency
Transnational politics is
not new, but OV outcomes
vary by case. For some
statists, OV is unlikely
and/or mistaken due to
sovereignty concerns.
Emphasizes immigration
politics. OV rarely moves
beyond artificial symbolic
politics. Domestic insiders
decide on, obstruct
overseas voting bids.
Transnational migrant
activism is a new force.
Diaspora appeals for OV
are reshaping democracy.
Strengths
Deep within-case analysis,
but disengaged from
theoretical reasoning and
comparative analysis.
Cross-national work
remains descriptive.
Accepts national-territorial
structures as largely fixed.
Existing research is
limited, assigns legislator
preferences arbitrarily,
lacks comparative analysis.
First to identify the topic
have contributed
significant empirical
research. Diaspora focus
can overlook crucial state
and party intermediation.
&
weaknesses
7
I address the normative debate over OV among legal scholars in the conclusion (Baubock 2007, RubioMarín 2006, López-Guerra 2005).
17
II
Political remittances amidst democratization
With economic power comes political power, scholars from Marx to Moore have
argued.8 This principle of political economy presents an interesting puzzle as we
contemplate the remittance boom. When and through what mechanisms do economic
remittances translate into political power? Do remittances drive states to institute open
overseas voting rules? As economic migrants generate more earnings, it is natural to
expect a corresponding formation of political interests and capacities. A conventional
approach to this topic has been the study of immigrant incorporation. However, this
dissertation chooses to ―follow the money‖ to the country of origin.
Remittances are not new, but the recent remittance boom is. According to the
World Bank (2006a, 92-99), a doubling in global flows to developing countries recorded
since 2000 has resulted from increasing scrutiny of flows, lower sending costs, improved
recording techniques, U.S. dollar depreciation, and growth in migrant stock and
incomes.9 The arrival of more complete remittance accounting highlights the labor export
trend as well as states' recognition of their ever more globally dispersed nations. As
indicated in Table 1.4, the number of countries with remittance data listed by the World
Bank increased from 41 to 127 between 1975 and 2005. The period has also seen a
tendency to greater remittance-dependency, with the number of states with remittances
equal to or greater than three per cent of GDP rising from 7 to 50.
8
9
Karl Marx, ―whenever through the development of industry and commerce, new forms of intercourse
have been evolved, the law has always been compelled to admit them . . .‖ (1846, 188). Barrington
Moore restated the idea negatively: ―no bourgeoisie, no democracy‖ (1966, 418).
In other words, states are better recording the growing real volumes that more, richer emigrants
increasingly send by bank transfers, and depreciated dollar units further inflate the global figures.
18
Table 1.4
States accounting for remittances, 1975 - 2005
# of States
1975
1985
1995
2005
41
78
113
127
> 10%
3
3
8
19
7 - 10%
1
6
1
10
3 - 7%
3
9
23
21
1 - 3%
9
15
27
24
0 - 1%
25
45
52
53
with recorded remittances listed
Remittances
as a
% of GDP
source: World Development Indicators.
The recent remittance boom has occurred along with a global trend among nationstates to cultivate diaspora favor with overseas voting rights. Since 1991, the number of
countries with overseas voting laws in effect has increased from 31 to more than 100.10
Other main national issues of cross-border diaspora politics in the labor export countries
are dual citizenship rights and equal access to home-country governance, which includes
customs and consular service reforms. More ambitious projects include coordinated
lobbying and extraterritorial representation in the national legislature. Overseas voting
has been the most salient issue in the two cases here and an important item across labor
export cases globally.
I define political remittances as the transfer of political resources for influence in
the home country by expatriate citizens, i.e. political actions undertaken outside of the
territory to affect the national polity. This conceptualization suggests a typology of the
10 Over 100 nation-states have adopted overseas voting laws (Ellis et al 2007), while 70 states had
implemented overseas voting, according to Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE 2006).
19
ways that an expatriate individual or group can act to influence the politics of the country
of origin.
Table 1.5 analyzes political remittances first according to the content sent, of
which three major types stand out. First, expatriate nationals have frequently intervened
in home country politics by sending crucial material resources in the form of arms or
funds. Secondly, they have sent back new ideational resources in the form of political
information, doctrines and mentalities acquired abroad. A third intermediate category of
direct electoral resources refers to the active elements of modern democratic politics such
as candidates, votes, party units and lobbies-- a less traditional type linked to recent mass
migration and democratization. Across all types, political remittances are composed of an
overseas political action and a specific resource that is sent home. These interventions
have occurred across a range of historic and current cases, as column four shows.
20
Table 1.5
Type
Material
Political Action
Political Remittances
Resources
Illustrative Case
Fund
Campaign funds raised from
strategic donors overseas.
Dominican parties NY, New England;
2000 ―Amigos de Fox‖ case;
Liberia, Ghana debates in Washington.
Arm
Military or human arms in
support of warring party,
insurgents.
NORAID transfers to Irish Republican Army
in 1970s.
Destroy / Invade
Coup or invasion blows by
exiled partisans with external
ally.
Alcibiades with Sparta on Athens;
Cuban exiles with US at Bay of Pigs;
Aristide with U.S. in Haiti;
Ahmed Chalabi with U.S. in Iraq.
Lobby
High-level access and skills to
influence internal debates via
US foreign policy or directly.
―La Coalición‖ (Mexico), COFEM;
Dominican-American Roundtable;
American Israeli PAC.
Vote
Voters and ballots sent in to
home country elections.
Dominican Republic 2004, 2008;
Mexico 2006;
90 states globally, 7 in Latin America.
Organize
Means to mobilize diaspora
voters, by state, party or civic
groups.
Federación Zacatecana;
Political party cells and comités;
Consulates state offices, 3 X 1, IME;
Migrant marches & Hispanic radio.
Run / Campaign
Emigrant politicians.
―El Rey Tomate‖ Zacatecas;
Diputados migrantes.
Inform / Educate /
Connect
New political information
about regime, opposition,
actors, networks, strategies.
Los Angeles Opinión, 1929 -- ;
Emigrant calls home, 2000 elections;
MX Sin Fronteras (Chicago 1999 --).
Persuade / Activate
New demands, ideologies
about HC governance.
Lenin, José Vasconcelos, Juan Bosch;
Mexican towns (Goldring);
Indian diaspora liberalization (Kapur).
Demonstrate
Transfer of political skills,
leadership developed abroad.
Transnational political entrepreneurs as new
actors (Zacapala, Dallas interviews).
Reformulate
Notions of identity;
Attitudes affecting political
behavior, democracy.
Focus group evidence;
Return migrant actors, officials;
Remittance recipients‘ surveys.
Electoral
Ideational
Elections beyond borders form one crucial type of political remittances in the
western hemisphere. The table above shows us how overseas voting fits within the
21
historical span of long-distance politics. Political remittances are not new as an activity,
nor have they normally been associated with labor diasporas. However, technological
change has made emigrants more visible and relevant in a greater number of situations.
For emigration states, the conjuncture of liberalization, emigration, and new technologies
has democratized diaspora politics and brought the voting issue to the fore.
Case selection: Mexico and the Dominican Republic
The concept of political remittances is a useful heuristic for the study of
transnational politics; it points out the relative newness of overseas voting along with its
historical precedents in other, different but analogous forms of long-distance
participation. Overseas voting rules call for qualitative analysis at the core of the multimethods framework, in two regards. First, the outcome results from a process involving
transnational interactions at multiple levels across time—a process that is affected by
many potentially significant causal factors. Secondly, the newness of the topic has
required descriptive analysis to confirm outcomes. For these reasons, initial scholarship
has mainly taken the form of qualitative single-case studies based on historical process
tracing (Calderón 2005, Itzigsohn 2000, Levitt 2001). The comparative case analysis
builds on existing social science research with a carefully paired comparison.
The case selection is consistent with Mill‘s method of difference, in which cases
with ―most similar‖ values on the independent variables nonetheless generate divergent
outcomes in the dependent variable (Ragin 1987, 39). In this approach, the strict rules of
case selection for quantitative analysis do not apply to the qualitative case studies
(George & Bennett 2005, 23). In the paired comparison of the two cases, the research
design reduces the number of potentially significant causal factors, identifying a few such
22
factors that do vary for ―structured-focused‖ investigation using qualitative techniques.
The factors with different values in Mexico and the Dominican Republic include overseas
state strength, subnational dynamics, diaspora dispersion, and size of diaspora and
remittances relative to the national economy and population. By tracing the role of each
through the process and evaluating its causal significance, the qualitative-comparative
analysis offers promise of greater accuracy as well as theoretical insights about the
different factors.
Mexico and the Dominican Republic are two of the most prominent remittance
democratizers. Similarities on salient characteristics of region, remittance dependency,
and recent political and economic liberalization make the two cases well-paired. Both are
U.S.-dependent developing countries and labor export leaders. For both, overseas citizens
are estimated at ten percent or more of national population. Mexico was second after
India among countries in total remittances, receiving $25 billion in 2007, while the
Dominican Republic was among twenty labor export leaders with remittances greater
than 10% of GDP, with $3.4 billion received in 2007. As well, the two have a particular
meaning to the U.S., since their emigrants and their descendants form the first- and thirdlargest national identities within the U.S. Hispanic population.11
Both Mexico and the Dominican Republic are part of a common historical
conjuncture within the developing world characterized by democratization and neoliberal
economic adjustments, emigration and remittances.12 The 1994-2008 period covers a
coherent chapter in each of the two national histories, from the onset of dual transitions
11 Cuban emigrants and Cuban-Americans compose the second largest segment of the U.S. Hispanic
population, however the home country regime and the polarized relationship rule out any question of
overseas voting. Rather, political remittances occur through other channels, on other questions.
12 Kapur and McHale (2003) identify the complementarities linking labor export and neoliberal reforms.
23
into reform's second generation. Both cases exhibit increasing electoral competitiveness,
massive labor export, and the neoliberal pattern of growth amidst poverty, inequality, and
a large, growing informal sector.
My argument
The dissertation‘s macro-analysis finds the inclusiveness of overseas voting
institutions to be contingent upon three factors of economic remittances (R$), political
competitiveness (PC), and the institutional autonomy of the overseas state in relation to
diaspora actors. The first two establish the scope condition: democratic countries with
some portion of citizens abroad who maintain ties to the homeland. As the case studies
document, the bureaucratic capacities and preferences of the overseas state form the
decisive factor in determining whether the country expands democracy to include the
diaspora and mobilizes the overseas population in national elections. The thesis draws
upon Evans' conceptualization of state autonomy as i) the capability to formulate goals
for the polity independently, along with ii) the ability of organizations to rely on
personnel to implement those goals and identify them as important to their own careers
(1995, 45). Of course, autonomy abroad depends upon the balance of capabilities
between government, party and diaspora actors. In weaker states, non-state actors may
mobilize and penetrate the government (Risse-Kappen (1995, 20-28). In formerly
authoritarian polities, the overseas state may structure and guide the participation of
overseas citizens (Stepan 1978), very likely toward non-electoral activities.
The dependent variable is the OV rules as implemented, an outcome that occurs
following a process of legislation and bureaucratic rule-making. Participation levels are
an essential part of overseas elections, affected to some degree by behavioral and
24
attitudinal variables. However, I hold that legislation and implementation set the range of
likely participation levels. Therefore, the dissertation focuses upon the nature of the rules
as implemented, which is determined by the following process.
Table 1.6
Two-stage process
Overseas voting rules as implemented = (R$ * PC) * overseas state capacities
Stage one: legislation
R$ * PC
==>
overseas voting law
Stage two: implementation
Negative case (Mexico)
overseas voting law * strong overseas state ==> restrictive implementation
Positive case (Dominican Republic)
overseas voting law * weak overseas state ==> expansive implementation
The two-stage process modeled in Table 1.6 begins with legislation and concludes
with the implementation of overseas voting (see also Appendix 1-B). First, economic
remittances lead diaspora activists to call for overseas voting rights, but the impact of this
bid depends upon political openness in the home country. With openness, resourceseeking political actors act to enfranchise the diaspora, passing an overseas voting law as
the positive result of the first stage of the process. The second stage of implementation
requires inter-party agreement on rules of the game for extraterritorial activities along
with deployment of state resources to organize voting. During this part of the process,
parties play a crucial role in determining the implementation outcomes arrived at by
25
electoral authorities, who are generally cautious and ready to stall, though also eager to
acquire international assignments that entail overseas budgets, travel and postings.
What then determines the actions of party leaders in competitive multi-party
environments on extraterritorial institution-building? Existing comparative research is of
little help in generating hypotheses.13 The leading research on developing country
systems is oriented to quantitative analysis of formal outcomes such as the number of
parties and electoral volatility (Morgenstern & D'Elia 2007, Mainwairing & Torcal 2005,
Jones & Mainwairing 2003).
In the absence of systematic analysis across cases, existing accounts of overseas
voting cases point to particular factors that are undertheorized and lacking in cross-case
generalizability, while academic research has yet to grapple with the topic and apply its
main theories in a way that captures the nuanced reality. As potential leading factors,
some interviewees mentioned population size and considered migratory status. These
factors can be important, but they did not determine the outcome in either case, I argue.
Many interviewees have pointed to the size of the Mexican diaspora as a factor that
prohibited the expansive implementation of overseas voting. However, there is no
correlation between country size and outcomes in Latin America, and large diasporas
have not precluded expansive voting rules in the Philippines, nor in the U.S. and the
U.K.. To emphasize the size factor confuses population scale with more direct causal
factors of state capacities and elite perceptions of national interest. While large diaspora
populations are generally correlated with closed voting, more research is necessary to
13 The comparative institutional research on party systems has a long history, with seminal works by
Duverger and Sartori, and is highly developed empirically.
26
confirm any determinate causal mechanism involving diaspora population scale. In this
light, and given the intensity of overseas interest in voting, the Mexico case raises the
question about why elite political actors have not regarded the large-scale overseas
population as a source of potential support, funds and future votes to be cultivated and
organized for electoral purposes.
The issue of migrants' legal status is a secondary factor in relation to overseas
voting, relevant only after implementation. For undocumented migrants primarily
interested not in voting but in avoiding authorities and obtaining valid working papers, an
illegal status may have a negative effect upon participation, in the event that overseas
voting is held. But it does not directly affect the actions of legislation and
implementation. Moreover, as in the case of Mexico, large diaspora populations feature
substantial internal heterogeneity, a fact that clouds efforts to theorize on the basis of any
average or summary characteristics of the overseas population.
Case study evidence points to the balance of political autonomy between
government forces and societal actors, across the polity and in the extraterritorial space.
When the balance favors the government over migrant actors, party leaders have more
reason to join with government officers, adopting their view of overseas elections as a
potential danger, and co-opt and demobilize new extraterritorial actors, rather than to
prioritize the struggle of those pushing for transformational reform from outside of the
system. In such cases, the implementation of overseas voting will tend to be restrictive.
By contrast, in party-led polities, in which political appointees dominate the national
state, party leaders and diaspora groups find little resistance to overseas politics, rather
consular access provides motive and infrastructure to further such activity. In this context,
27
extraterritorial voting institutions will tend to be expansive.
In the overseas state argument, remittances and political openness are necessary
but not sufficient for open rules. Rather, remittances and openness are mediated by a
structural characteristic of the polity, namely the institutional strength and preferences of
the overseas state. As Table 1.7 shows, the key factors are whether the electoral authority
and the foreign ministry are run by professional civil service committed to territorial
sovereignty or by political appointees serving a political party.
Table 1.7
Overseas state structures
Strong: professionalized,
independent, hierarchical
(Mexico)
Weak: politicized, client-led
(Dominican Republic)
bureaucratic state
political parties & societal actors
Foreign ministry &
Electoral authority
professional diplomatic corps,
independent board
political appointees,
weak electoral unit
Mechanism
consulates oppose diaspora
voting and highlight its risks.
unrestricted party-diaspora links
transform consulates into vehicle for
pursuing overseas resources.
prohibitive or restrictive
expansive
Who governs?
OV rules outcome
In all countries, consulates play a central role in diaspora politics as monopoly
provider of national law and legitimacy, a reality rooted in the sovereignty principle and
sanctioned by the international system. For labor exporters, the capacities of the foreign
ministry and electoral agency compose the key factor shaping the overseas voting
institution. With career diplomats appointed by the government in charge, the consulates
possess institutional strength in relation to emerging migrant groups; when this is coupled
28
with a capable electoral agency, the government is able and disposed to blocking
activities that run against its agenda such as overseas elections. By contrast, the absence
of strong transnational structures opens the organs of state to prevailing non-state actors,
enabling diaspora entrepreneurs and party actors to develop clientelistic relationships,
which support expansive rules, tap into remittance networks, and integrate consulates into
cross-border patronage networks.
III
Critical contributions
Generally, political science has dealt with labor export as immigration not
emigration, and so it has devoted little attention to either remittances or overseas voting.14
Interventions by overseas voters have been noted for mainly low participation levels
rather than their occasionally dramatic effects or a more subtle but persistent upward
drift. The discipline‘s applied research is unable to account for the extent of variation we
see in overseas voting rules. This gap is striking in light of the field‘s body of work on
bureaucratic politics, domestic structure and transnational relations (Allison and Halperin
1972, Katzenstein 1978, Evangelista 1997). The overseas state framework developed in
the dissertation draws on Evans' state-society framework and International Relations (IR)
theories of transnational actors that look across different levels of analysis. Such an
approach captures cross-border activities, incorporates the diaspora as a field of
potentially autonomous activity, and allows for feedback over time.
The subfields of IR and comparative politics use different labels for their
theoretical perspectives, but in their overarching conceptual bases, they fall into a basic
three-paradigm classification. The main theoretical perspectives in contemporary IR
14 See Rosenblum and Cornelius 2005 for a review of the political science literature on immigration.
29
theory are realism, liberalism, and constructivism;15 in comparative politics, most
research falls into structural, rationalist, or culturalist approaches (Lichbach 1997, 242245). In both IR and comparative politics, state-centric and rationalist theories form a
broad mainstream, merging conceptually in the form of neoliberal and rational choice
institutionalism, which accept institutional legacies and then analyze the strategic
interaction of utility-maximizing actors within given constraints. In this division of labor,
IR focuses upon more highly aggregated units at the macro-level of the international
system. Underlying this arrangement, however, is the premise that nation-states are the
basic unit of all politics, an assumption that Zürn labels ―methodological nationalism‖
(2001, 248). As a result, the mainstream orthodoxy has deemphasized transnational
linkages and cleavages across its units. Taken too far, the rationalist framework may
allow myopia about changing perceptions and norms, emerging actors, and effects of
policy feedback and institutional learning over time. In such dynamic situations, it is
appropriate to consider the kind of politics involved, policy content, and the basic
principles underlying particular rules of the game. In the study of developing countries,
territorial nation-state organization should be seen empirically, as a variable.
The evolving reality of political remittances poses a problem to the structuralrationalist synthesis, since institutional legacies are not fixed but rather precisely the
subject in question. In one useful effort to address this problem, behavioral analysis has
confirmed that a sizable portion of the Mexican diaspora is indeed interested in homecountry politics with the desire to participate (McCann et al 2006). But it cannot easily
explain why the voter turnout rate of overseas Mexicans was so extremely low in 2006.
15 Koslowski's classification (2002, 376) refers to Walt 1998 and Katzenstein, Keohane & Krasner 1998.
30
An important difference between the subfields has been the counter-conventional
movement among a set of IR scholars to study politics at different levels of analysis,
which has generated most of the existing transnational relations research literature in the
discipline. This move, first associated with Keohane and Nye (1977) and Gourevitch
(1978, 2001) and advanced by Risse-Kappen (1995), opens the analysis to questions
about the nature of the units and to a sociological perspective, affording an ample new
topical reach including feedback effects over time. Keck and Sikkink (1998) connect the
world polity to distinct political contests within states, combining micro-politics with the
evolving perceptions and norms of networked actors across different levels. Their work
also better specifies transnational actors, who are differentiated by the nature of their
projects and whether these are motivated by instrumental goals, causal beliefs or
principled beliefs. Their concepts of issue-specific activist networks and the use of moral
leverage are directly relevant to remittance diaspora politics. The transnational advocacy
framework moves the analysis closer to the ground by linking external activists in global
networks to indigenous social movement leaders and elite technocratic networks. They
make the world polity framework more tangible and usable by embedding norms in
motivated actors and including domestic level outcomes in the study of global processes.
Migrants, nations and states
Overseas voting has important concrete and conceptual significance for political
studies. Overseas votes have decisively affected recent election outcomes in democracies
of both South and North—in South Africa in 1994 (Navarro 2002, 61), Italy in 2006
(Battiston and Mascitelli 2008), and the U.S. in 2000 and 2008. As Mexico and Ghana
will show, decisions to exclude or restrict overseas participation have been crucial in
31
determining election winners in recent close elections decided by extremely narrow
margins. In these cases, research shows instances of consequential (mis)calculations to
oppose expansive OV by individual politicians whose parties would have been aided by a
strong diaspora vote. By structuring the nature and scale of overseas participation, OV
rulemaking is very much a political matter of consequence for who governs.
Regarding theory, OV illustrates the complex politics of institutional change in a
transnational context. It shows how the conventional IR approach fails to animate the
study of globalization in the developing world, in which constructs of unitary actor states,
systemic norms and the North-South divide can be misleading. When political struggles
become transnational, national interest means little (even as a framing device), and
borders have long been permeable for those with know-how and status. Political rules of
the game are contingent upon domestic realities, even as their evolution is shaped by
networked actors able to reach across borders.
The explanation goes beyond rationalist accounts such as Parra (2005), capturing
novel remittance effects in a richer fashion, but stops short of the transformational
argument that remittance diasporas are subverting nation-state institutions with postnational forms of citizenship, as implied by Levitt (2001) and Moctezuma (2004). The
dissertation offers new empirical knowledge on OV with implications for broader debates
related to political change and periodization.
This research fits into a broader debate about whether today's globalization
heralds ―an epochal transformation‖ in political institutions, or rather is just the latest
instance of incremental adaptation to the Westphalian nation-state. Overseas voting
regimes adopted by states typify the ―micro-transformations‖ referred to by Sassen that
32
―reorient institutions and practices toward global logics and away from historically
shaped national logics‖ (2006, 1-2). However, Sassen emphasizes denationalization, and
along with transnationalist advocates of ―globalization from below,‖ she views migrant
agency as a progressive form of escape from state hierarchy.
By contrast, this study points out the enduring power of nationality and its
ambiguities as a political resource for migrant agency. The struggle to define and build
new institutions for participation in a deterritorialized context reveals the evolving nature
of the nation as bounds of the polity, and it calls into question the de-linking of nation
from state. While Sassen's denationalization implies convergence to a global logic,
diaspora projects go the other way, even in the most liberal form imaginable, invoking
global norms of democratic participation in pursuit of particular national projects.
Extraterritorial politics thus has as its center the transformation and perpetuation of an
ascriptive group identity16 as vehicle for civic participation.
While state-centric theorists hold that nation-states continue to direct the terms of
political membership, the overseas voting case studies document how actors linked to
cross-border processes and flows are driving state moves to re-construct these rules. The
analysis offers a telling lens on party politics, within and between countries, to evaluate
how parties of left, right and center have responded to diaspora actors. Whether these
interactions reflect a change in the condition, nature or function of parties, and whether
their intermediation of society and polity reflects a different organizing logic—the case
studies offer concrete tests of these questions, both internally, of the party and the polity,
16 Ascriptive citizenship refers to the bounding of political participation to national citizens who meet the
jus soli or jus sanguinis condition, i.e. to those born in the national territory or as children of citizens
(Sapiro 1987, 116).
33
as well as externally, at the level of the global polity. A paradox to explore is why the
Dominican Republic's expansive institution reflects aspects of external transformation in
the consulates and at the U.N, while the account of Mexico's restrictive rules nevertheless
involves processes of internal transformation.
The study of remittance politics places an even greater emphasis on national
institutions within the unit level than does the Keck and Sikkink approach, and it points
out another category of non-state actor in diaspora society groups focused on national
political goals. Transnational political entrepreneurs (TPEs) are those who pursue
political power in the domestic arena through the use of external ties and resources,
connecting diaspora politics to the center of the domestic arena.
Transnational political entrepreneurship may be concentrated in government
efforts, diaspora civic society organization, or political party mobilization, depending
upon the case. It refers to the institution-building that galvanizes the activism and talents
of overseas nationals to impact the polity. This may take the form of colonizing the
diaspora, instituting an extraterritorial state, or driving the formation of an elite global
policy network. TPEs are similar to the coyotes and remeseros who facilitate cross-border
economic flows: they hold the tickets sought by domestic players seeking political
support abroad, and they broker the activities that link distant senders back to the
imagined community. They include overseas party liaisons and expatriate activists,
consular officials and their clients at home and abroad. Nationality ties them to the home
country, even as they are agents of globalization, fluent in today's language of democracy
and rights, its economic logic of competitive prices and Internet options.
If labor export continues to grow globally, then we should study remittance
34
diasporas in relation to both comparative and international politics. Gourevitch argued
that internal structure affects not only international relations but also filters international
pressures into the arena of domestic politics. In this study, too, state structure mediates
the impact of diaspora politics upon the national polity. However, diaspora politics also
flow in two directions to generate effects externally. As the case studies show, the
dynamics involved in particular national processes affect a reshaping of the international
system through transnational fora and learning from one another. There is a two-way flow
of influence and ideas, within global nations—but also in relation to multiple resident
countries and international NGOs and authorities.
As diaspora politics evolve in the contemporary setting, this process has
implications beyond the unit level. It reminds us of Anderson's historical lesson about the
original spread of nationalism, in which provincial functionaries and print capitalists
conspired to shape the modern consciousness (1991, 65). This was a process of truly
epochal change, with the formation of a new kind of unit. By contrast, today's
extraterritorial nation-building is a more modest and less radical enterprise, combining
equal parts perpetuation and transformation. If we look only at the low tallies of overseas
votes in Mexico's 2006 election, a trend to global nations may appear quite unlikely.
Given today's demographic, technological and economic realities, however, remittance
diasporas may persist. The incremental construction of extraterritorial institutions points
out the resilience of state structures, evolving as necessary in the face of change. In this
scenario, an arrival of re-imagined communities appears less radical.
IV
Research design and methodology
The dissertation's research design introduces a multi-method home-country
35
framework for studying transnational politics that stands in contrast to the main existing
approaches utilized in transnational politics research to date. With its mix of qualitative
and quantitative methods across multiple sites, it links diaspora society at local, national
and global levels to domestic institutional outcomes. In contrast to the ethnographic and
often translocal nature of most transnationalist work, this research goes beyond the
description of transnational political activities to investigate their effects upon national
institutions; also in contrast to the deep case studies of the same niche, it develops a more
prominent comparative component in its attention to multiple cases. Responding to
globalist theories of Sassen, Friedrichs and Zürn, the dissertation‘s empirical work
provides an ample, rich basis for an original interpretation about the state of world
politics that is varied and changing while marked heavily by nation-state structures.
Similar in its methodology to the multi-sited research of Keck and Sikkink and others, it
traces transnational networks across borders to interview political actors in different sites,
but its topic of diaspora politics is linked more closely to domestic politics arenas and so
permits a supporting large-n analysis. Finally, while most transnational research by
comparativists remains rooted in a conventional immigration politics perspective, the
framework's home-country focus targets a greater scholarly lacuna.
The research began with books and documents, moved to direct engagement with
analysts and practitioners in the field work stage, and then in the third stage shifted to
online research to build a broader database across cases and region. The sequence of
consulting documents, actors, and online sources became a cycle throughout the research
with recurring iterations that sharpened the research question and extended its range.
The research is based on over 120 interviews of analysts, government bureaucrats
36
and experts, elected politicians, party leaders and activists, and migrant organizers and
advocates. The bulk of the interviews took place in Mexico in 2006 and in the Dominican
Republic in 2007, with a significant additional portion carried out in New York, Los
Angeles, Providence and Washington, DC. The interviews followed a structured-focused
format, averaging between sixty and ninety minutes but extending further with the most
important sources. The government managers, politicians and lobbyists with the richest
firsthand experience of the recent overseas voting campaigns also had the greatest interest
in the topic, and fortunately, they were open to multiple follow-up exchanges. In both
Mexico and the Dominican Republic, the field research was enriched by multiple
opportunities to participate as a special visiting researcher in conferences, workshops and
focus groups dedicated to state-diaspora relations that were organized by government and
civic groups (see references section for a detailed listing). In turn, at least four
presentations of preliminary findings to my host institutions also generated useful queries
and comments from the resident experts there; these insights are integrated into the
chapters and the overall research conclusions that follow.
A number of substantive reasons justify the home-country focus. The most basic
signal lies in the direction of transfers, a fact that reinforces associations between sender
and home country. With remittances flowing to countries such as Mexico and the
Dominican Republic, we should look there for evidence of their political impact.
Additionally, for home countries, economic migrants represent a human resource for
long-run development, not only for remittances but for trade, investment and leadership,
and as well for their strategic importance as fellow nationals in more powerful resident
countries. Home countries need them, but they also owe them. Advocates of overseas
37
voting find powerful moral grounds for support not only in global norms of democracy
and rights, but also in particular shared memories and bonds of national history, as
polities commit themselves to democratization. Obligation alone is insufficient to force
change, but the home country focus points out a vibrant, varied topic.
The multi-methods research design is based on a cross-national comparison of
two most similar national cases that are contextualized within an accompanying
quantitative analysis. The primary goal is to explain the different institutional outcomes
in Mexico and the Dominican Republic; it is based on an investigation of how remittance
diasporas have intervened on the overseas voting issue. Thus the research traces the
micro-political mechanisms that activate (or obstruct) electoral competitiveness and link
remittances to the expansion of overseas voting. Complementing the dissertation's core
research is a secondary goal of advancing mid-level theories about political remittances
and the determinants of expansive overseas voting institutions. In the quantitative
analysis, research required locating sources and forced thinking about how the political
processes involved in OV rulemaking play out in different contexts. The process of
testing the explanation across all of the states in the system stimulates comparative
thinking, disciplines the analysis of the case studies, and evaluates the extent to which
they are part of larger global processes at work.17
The transnational factors involved in the topic require integrating different levels
of politics, which cohere in support of a clear research focus upon national institutional
outcomes. Document work and interviews served to construct a chronology on the
17 In alternating qualitative analysis of case study processes with large-n analysis, the research design
shares aspects of Lieberman's ―nested case-study‖ framework (2005).
38
national level, which identified key turning points in the processes of legislation and
implementation in each case. The methodological center lay in in-depth interviews with
relevant experts and political actors across these different fields. The chronologies guided
interviews and provided focus to field work over the months spent living in each country,
including the inductive activities between interviews, such as visiting towns, traveling in
buses, and directly absorbing national debates in daily news media and conversations.
The more elite-focused institutional research of historical process-tracing, elite
interviews and quantitative analysis is matched by an important grass-roots component
pursued in field work. The survey of migrant society explored subnational and
transnational sites to gauge the topic‘s impact beyond the political establishment, with
supporting interviews of diaspora citizens and officials in the U.S. To control for regional
variation in Mexico, research design conducted within-case analysis of state institutions
in Puebla and Zacatecas. Similarly, field work in the Dominican Republic included a
series of interviews with politicians in the city of La Vega, an important commercial
center and source of migration. In both cases, research benefited from immersion and
participation in multiple-day conferences in Los Angeles and Washington involving
home-country politicians and diaspora activists and citizens. The research confirmed that
transnational communities and networks are dense and real. In this manner, field work in
the home-country led to interviews with diaspora leaders in government, party and civic
roles—in Providence, Boston, New York, Washington and Los Angeles.
Along with the question of scale, differences between the two cases in median per
capita income and national history required consideration. Some Dominican interviewees
distinguished a poor Caribbean nation from the world's thirteenth largest economy.
39
However, per capita GDP is a misleading aggregate that masks comparable levels of
income inequality and poverty in the two countries. Research shows higher GDP to be
positively associated with open rules, which does not fit the two cases. So income
differentials do not explain the divergence.
Differing national histories contain some part of the explanation of divergence,
but the qualitative case study method largely controls for this factor. With regard to the
overseas voting stories, random and omitted aspects of the national histories of Mexico
and the Dominican Republic are diffuse and often contradictory, without any singular
explanatory mechanism. Research took various useful steps to account for the
idiosyncratic factor of history, incorporating historical analysis not only in the qualitative
case studies, but also in the longitudinal perspective applied to the time series analysis
and the extension case studies. It considers how historians would answer the research
question, and it seeks to understand actor strategies as shaped in part by their historical
development. These efforts add important bits of insight, as in, for example, the central
role of Dominican parties to be discussed in chapter four.
Getting research design right reveals a paradoxical aspect of globalization, namely
in the ways that the power of nationality endures as it evolves. The orientation of
emigrants in the present era does not follow a simple logic of assimilation; rather, they
remain connected to home countries even as they pass years abroad. Thus, political
membership and identification remain linked in some part to their countries of origin,
notwithstanding naturalization and resettlement. This study of remittances takes
nationality seriously, along with its links to states. For nationality remains largely the
property of states, although not exclusively—an important tension the case studies
40
analyze in terms of specific diaspora efforts to reshape the homeland polity.
V
Chapter summaries
Chapter 2 presents an historical review of overseas voting institutions and a
quantitative analysis of the experience of modern states in the last four decades. With a
time-series analysis and a two-stage selection model, it tests remittances and factors
related to the country's political regime, demography, economy, and international
situation. The questions addressed are: what factors are associated with state actions to
adopt open overseas voting institutions? What historical factors and contexts are
associated with overseas voting, and have remittances been significant? Other factors
tested are political openness and regime age, expatriate population, percentage in the
diaspora, national population size, and GDP.
From the review of the recent global history of overseas voting, we learn that
modern nation-states typically fall into five different generalized historical contexts that
have been conducive to overseas voting (war, liberal development, decolonization, labor
export, regime change). In the current era, the predominant type of country context is the
democratizing developer, especially when also an exporter of labor. By contrast, less
numerous but noteworthy are the cases of externally-led overseas voting in countries
recovering from civil war or state collapse, in which international institutions play a more
concerted role, such as in Afghanistan, Iraq and East Timor. The chapter also documents
the administrative study of overseas voting, establishing the two-stage procedural frame
for analyzing the rules that countries adopt.
In the case study chapters (3-5), a four-part format guides both the two in-depth
case studies and the shorter, secondary case reviews extending the analysis to the new
41
regions. Starting with the legislative-bureaucratic process, the first part identifies the
institutional outcome and key turning points across the fourteen-year period. The second
part analyzes the key interactions of government, party and migrant actors. The case
studies draw on qualitative data from field research to document the narrative and
illustrate the causal processes at work. Next, the third part evaluates the significance of
the overseas voting outcome in relation to the country‘s broader organization of
extraterritorial politics, analyzing the transnational flows of ideas and power in each case
in terms of their content and direction. Each case study closes with a brief review of a
few theoretical implications and future considerations.
Chapter 3 analyzes the Dominican case. In 2004, the Dominican Republic
celebrated its first Presidential election with full overseas voting rights, with participation
by overseas Dominicans greater than in Mexico's election despite an overseas population
less than one-tenth the size of Mexico's. The Dominican state has extended the entire
electoral process of registration, party organization and fundraising into the abroad,
creating a remarkably open institution for overseas party activities. Party competitiveness
within an historical context catalyzes the push for resources abroad, while domestic
clientelism sustains intense cross-border coordination to form overseas party units.
The story that emerges from the Dominican case reflects not only a greater
permeability of the polity to remittance effects but a different kind of political change.
Political entrepreneurs act as agents of home country political parties to colonize the
diaspora, extend patronage extraterritorially, and corrode the institutions of state. This
project has generated an axis of conflict between homeland party actors eager to access
the diaspora as a political resource, and Dominican-American reform progressives intent
42
upon organizing in pursuit of representation within U.S. politics. The process of
expansive institution-building has served to diffuse home country ideologies, norms and
modes of organization externally, far more than it has to generate or transmit distinctive
political visions from the diaspora back to the home country.
Chapter 4 presents the Mexico case study, explaining the restrictive reform by
tracing political party responses and state-diaspora relations. In the legislative stage of the
process, a coalition of diaspora activists makes an impact in overcoming elite opposition
to force a recorded vote on implementing legislation, which results in passage of the key
voting law. Party elites had major fears about overseas voting and deliberately crafted a
highly restrictive law, creating a rigid process that effectively disenfranchised the bulk of
the overseas citizenry and largely explains the extremely low turnout of Mexican migrant
voters in the 2006 Presidential election.
The chapter analyzes the politics behind Mexico's restrictive outcome, including
the ways that remittance effects occur in a state-led polity. Faced with a cleavage between
elite structures and diaspora voices, party leaders opposed overseas voting and favored
state-led political remittances. Migrants only achieved a partial change in national
political institutions, yet their political activities have inserted diaspora actors and
concerns into high-level processes going forward. Mexico‘s restrictive rules and the low
turnout of 2006 have sapped much momentum from the overseas voting cause, while its
government outreach programs have redirected transnational participation toward
revitalized consular service provision and elite network-building. The new project
contains tension between traditional co-optation and an unprecedented transnational
pluralism, calling attention to the evolving strategies of entrepreneurs organizing politics
43
across borders, both inside and outside of the Mexican government.
Chapter 5, which is devoted to a set of brief extension case studies, tests the
institutional argument in important labor export cases outside of Latin America. To
control for region, it conducts three paired extension case studies in each of East Asia
(Philippines and South Korea), South Asia (India and Indonesia) and western Africa
(Senegal and Ghana). The criteria guiding case selection include variance in the OV
outcome and in the theoretically specified variable of overseas state capacities. The scope
restriction requires a positive political openness score and some number of remittancesending overseas nationals. Utilizing legal documents, news accounts and secondary
sources, the chapter identifies for each case the overseas voting institution in place and
then applies the state-diaspora framework to the case. By tracing the key actors and
events in terms of the theoretically specified factors, it evaluates the extent to which
remittance effects are occurring across different cultures and geographies.
The cases were selected from the labor-exporting newer democracies,18 which
form one major type investigated in the dissertation among the broader scope of
democracies with significant populations abroad. In Asia, India and South Korea have
restricted or denied OV, while Indonesia and the Philippines have implemented relatively
open OV institutions. India and the Philippines are two major remittance countries that
show divergent overseas state capacities and outcomes on overseas voting. The India case
is analogous to Mexico: a large federal developmental state responds to a mobilized
diaspora with corporatist solutions and advisory councils instead of overseas voting.
18 Appendix 1-C presents an index of 50 leading labor-exporting newer democracies (LEND states) based
on four factors of political openness, regime age, expatriate population, and economic remittances.
44
Meanwhile, the Philippines case appears analogous to the Dominican case: a weak state
dominated by private interests and civic society groups moves to open voting with the
implementation of relatively expansive rules in the first implementation exercise in 2004.
Senegal also typifies the ―weak state with open voting‖ image. Lastly, in contrast,
Ghana‘s recent rebuff of overseas voting stems from the politicization of earlier
emigration and the state-nationalist impulses of influential opposition leader and exPresident, Jerry Rawlings.
The concluding chapter reconsiders the case analyses in light of the debates about
transformation and periodization. Specifically, the findings here call into question the link
between expansive extraterritorial politics and more transformative change suggested by
writers such as Sassen and Goldring. The two cases reveal mixed results, including
surprising details that turn the tables on the conventional vision of diaspora-led
extraterritorial voting as a progressive project and state-led extraterritorial institutions as
restrictive and co-optive. As we learn from the Dominican case, thick party-diaspora
bonds permeate the polity and extend party governance into the global space in novel
ways, while expansive electoral politics crowd out the transparency-accountability
agenda hoped for by transnationalists. On the contrary, the Mexico research locates
pressures for progressive transformation not only in the migrant activist network but also
in the heart of the government's professional foreign service. Overall, the effects of
remittances upon overseas voting rules depend upon whether politics are state-led or
party-led, and these institutional outcomes lead to transformation in different and
unexpected ways.
Chapter 2
Overseas Voting in Global-historical Perspective
Between 1991 and 2007, the number of states that had implemented overseas
voting (OV) increased by more than 100%, from 31 to 70, including eight of Latin
America's twenty-one most populous nation-states. In 2006, Mexico and Ecuador joined
a diverse global set including the Philippines, Senegal, Bosnia and Peru. But the
worldwide tendency to institutionalize OV has not been uniform. As of 2004, 29 of the
world‘s 82 most politically open countries had not implemented overseas voting,
including India, South Korea and Ghana profiled in chapter five. Despite evidence of a
new trend with global reach and puzzling variation, there has been little systematic
analysis of the phenomenon across regions. This chapter takes up the dissertation's
research question in global terms: what are the most important factors involved in
determining whether, and how inclusively, states act to implement overseas voting?
Standing explanations point to particular national political processes and events as
the main set of factors; they are ad hoc in manner. As this chapter shows, however,
common domestic and global factors have shaped the overseas voting phenomenon
across cases over time, from pre-modern antecedents to modern era precedents to the
recent global diffusion of the practice since 1991. Internally, sudden regime change and
democratization processes have been important in spurring OV legislation and opening.
Externally, large-scale military campaigns and decolonization have led to long-distance
participation, while emigration and remittances are today the main external factor
favoring OV. Recently, national diasporas have come to play a crucial role in linking the
internal and external efforts in support of democratization.
The historical summary and the large-n quantitative study advance the
dissertation's research in a few valuable ways, as key parts of an integrated multi-
45
46
methods framework. The historical review points out the different political-economic
scenarios that have moved countries to adopt overseas voting and situates the labor
export democratizers in global context. This enables proper specification of the study‘s
scope: while possible for all countries, OV arises as a real possibility mainly in
democratic countries, and especially recent democratizers. The chapter‘s first part
reviews descriptive accounts of overseas voting, based on historical experience and
contemporary analysis by practitioners and theorists. It reviews existing academic studies
and summarizes standing explanations. It then draws on original field data to document
the recent formation of an international policy network as an additional factor.
The chapter‘s second section introduces a concise framework for comparative
analysis of overseas voting as a two-stage process involving legislation and
implementation outcomes. The research design for the quantitative analysis identifies key
explanatory factors, formulates causal hypotheses, and then tests them across each of the
two stages of the process. Two models generate novel statistical findings for factors such
as political openness, remittance volumes, remittance dependency, national population,
diaspora size and foreign intervention—both over the last four decades, and in the present
decade alone. The second selection model has been re-specified to account for the twostage process over time and to avoid selection bias; its findings tell us the average effects
for each explanatory factor for all states in the system.
The third section interprets the statistical results and considers their implications
for the case studies. Quantitative analysis enables us to begin to make inferences about
the relative importance and nature of the different explanatory factors for OV outcomes
across cases. Specifically, it points out the statistically significant factors of remittances,
47
expatriates and population, and it confirms the criteria for extension case selection
(implementation outcome, region, and foreign ministry type). The case study chapters go
on to evaluate closely the ways in which these factors may take effect as causal
mechanisms in the particular national processes that lead to divergent outcomes in
Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
I
Existing knowledge: Historical experience, Global perspective
The number of countries practicing overseas voting has risen in recent decades
along with the third wave of democracy. Table 2.0 depicts the OV trend of recent decades
specifically in regard to implementation, showing the total number of countries to have
implemented voting to have risen to 63 by 2005, up from 31 in 1991. Global growth in
the practice has continued in recent years, too, so that by 2007 over 115 countries had
passed OV laws and roughly two thirds of these had implemented overseas elections.19
Table 2.0
Overseas Voting Trend
19 Ellis, Navarro et al, eds., Voting from abroad (Stockholm: IDEA-IFE, 2007), p. 3.
48
Until recent years, studies of the subject have been practically non-existent
(Carpizo 1999, 73). Still underdeveloped but growing in volume, existing scholarship on
overseas voting has three main strands in historical, academic, and policy approaches to
the subject.
Historical analysis
The practice of overseas voting has evolved along with modern democracy,
mainly in the twentieth century, however earlier historical antecedents remind us that this
form of political remittances is not new. In classical times, Athenians who peopled the
colonies of Magna Graecia practiced an ancient form of extra-territorial democracy by
directly electing their consul, cementing an orientation to the polis in selecting a
representative leader to stand and speak to Athens and other parties on their behalf.
In early modern Europe, in the case of England and its colonies in America, the
right to vote by mail was ―permitted to respectable men in 1634,‖ according to
Dominican authors.20 Obviously, colonial England was not about to institute any form of
transatlantic democracy, but it presents a historical example of national political
community spanning great distance and points to the contingent political and
technological factors that affect the practice of overseas voting. First, the home country
needs to be democratic (not yet the case here), and secondly, overseas participation is
reliant on direct communication links (also problematic here).
Even as a pre-industrial settler colony facing a months-long lapse in
communications, the colonial England case suggests the linkages between participatory
institutions on the one hand and political identity and loyalty on the other. The king's
20 Guzmán Castillo and Feris (2002, 2), as translated from the author's original text in Spanish.
Presumably, the overseas voting in this case involved Parliamentary suffrage by the crown‘s officers
via transatlantic ship courier from the colonies, and not the broader population of male landholders.
49
distant home country rule generated political claims among English-born colonists
expressed in terms of participation in government. The absence of extraterritorial
democracy provided grounds for famous charges of ―taxation without representation‖ a
century and a half later. While transatlantic democracy was out of the question, one can
see that political institutions were clearly linked to the evolving attitudes and identities of
the king's American subjects. In the present era, migrant participation in home country
politics is a much more intense reality due to the speed of communications, the nature of
migration, and the growth of nation-states. Rather than mass migration, however, modern
warfare would provide the first direct precedents for today's overseas voting.
For modern democracies, overseas absentee voting as a national practice
originated in the twentieth century‘s world wars, as the belligerent states that happened to
be democratic sought a means to allow their soldiers to vote. An earlier precedent of
special rules for military voting by long distance occurred in the U.S. for the Presidential
election of 1864 during the Civil War, with the state of Wisconsin arranging for absentee
voting for its soldiers enlisted in the Union army campaign to reunite the national
territory. While in this case the territoriality from which the soldiers voted was in dispute
(and not overseas), the Civil War case is typical of a set of cases in which a distinctive
moment of nation-state formation, a crucial historical moment of regime change related
to internal conflict, created uniquely charged politics that called for special measures to
enable extraterritorial voting. Also, the possibility of long-distance voting in the U.S. in
1864 was enabled by a 19th century revolution in communications in the telegraph and
railroad. The U.S. Civil War case thus illustrates the complexity of OV, in the unique
national historical circumstances that give rise to it, together with the global forces of
50
state formation and communications that have favored its diffusion.
The great wars of the twentieth century gave the first major boost to overseas
voting, beginning in World War I with the United Kingdom, and then in World War II
with Canada and the U.S. The U.S. case included a more full-scale implementation for
the 1944 Presidential election, which saw over 1 million overseas soldiers submit ballots.
Two prior cases driven by maritime commerce were New Zealand and Australia in 1902
and 1907. In all of these cases, OV took place on an ad hoc basis that was not
institutionalized; the countries chose to authorize OV and adapted procedures as a special
measure for each election.
The later Cold War period saw the beginnings of the sustained expansion both in
the number of countries and in the democratic openness to participation by the full range
of overseas citizens. Indonesia and Colombia were among the first developing country
states to legislate OV at the beginning of the 1970s. The U.S. established permanent OV
in Presidential elections in 1968 and then expanded this to the entire overseas citizenry in
a 1975 law that was amended along more expansively participatory lines in 1996 (US
GAO 2001). In Latin America, as elsewhere, the overseas vote trend coincides with the
recent experience of democratization and liberalization, in particular labor export to the
U.S. and dollar remittances. Mirroring and building upon past technological
breakthroughs, late twentieth century developments of jet air travel, satellite links, and
the Internet have driven a further decline in distance and enabled broader participation in
national politics from vast distances.
Overseas voting was originally globalized within areas of Anglo-Saxon
expansion, as the historical analysis shows. Today, however, it has transcended its
51
original lineages and stands as a hegemonic institution in the sense of its widespread
acceptance as a legitimate state practice throughout the international system. It flourishes
not as a tool of domination between states but rather in the ways that it reflects a
normative consensus about representative democracy, offers a solution to participation
demands made on behalf of growing transnational diasporas, and sustains the primacy of
nation-state membership and organization. States' hopes of retaining emigrant loyalty
may be most important in explaining the institution's present popularity. However, the
effectiveness of OV as a tool to cement loyalties and direct migrant identification remains
questionable today, especially in the absence of open implementation.
Standing explanations
The understudied puzzle of divergence in the OV rules of Mexico and the
Dominican Republic is mirrored at the global level, where we see significant variation in
OV rules but no systematic hypothesis-testing to date. From the historical review, a
typology emerges involving six main descriptive explanations, as summarized in Table
2.1. First, legislation is varied and responds to the specific internal realities of each
country (Calderón, Navarro). Second, some liberal democracies began to introduce the
vote during the 20th century's two world wars (Carpizo). Third, other liberal democracies
joined this number, on a case by case basis, often with restrictions (Aquino). Fourth,
decolonization and national independence in the 1960s and 1970s spurred simultaneous
steps by departing European powers and Third World state-builders to formally
incorporate their expatriate citizens suddenly made distant across multiple new states
(Navarro).
In the contemporary period, democratization reforms in developing countries
52
enabled the recent boom, augmented by the new visibility of technologically-linked
remittance-sending diasporas (Navarro). In these cases, recent increases in migration and
transnational communities have generated a more politicized demand-driven process of
OV expansion, a process feared by some and welcomed by others. Finally, sixth, sudden
regime change and international occupation have been associated with a number of recent
post-conflict cases that have opened voting to a displaced diaspora, such as Bosnia,
Afghanistan and Iraq (IDEA 2007).
Table 2.1
Six main explanations: overseas voting laws and implementation
Explanation
Era
Mechanism
Exemplars
internal interests, case-by-case
all cases
1
domestic politics
1890 -
2
democracies at war
1916-19, war legitimization compels franchise United Kingdom (WWI)
1940s
for citizen-soldier masses
U.S., Canada (WW II)
3
liberal development over time
4
decolonization, nation-building
5
democratization & labor export
6
regime change, post-conflict
international intervention
1950s -
expansive rights politics identify
expat citizens as beneficiary class
Belgium
Sweden
1960s,
1970s
guarantees to ex-colonials,
formalizing state identities
Portugal, Spain
Indonesia
1990s -
remittance effects and party
competitiveness
Mexico, Honduras,
Dominican Republic
1990s -
reincorporation of exile populations, Cambodia; Bosnia,
externally led nation-building
Croatia; Afghanistan, Iraq
Global perspective
As part of the post-Cold War democratization boom, the overseas voting trend has
generated an epistemic community21 in the collaboration between international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), formal inter-governmental organizations, and
leading national electoral authorities, particularly those of Mexico, as well as other states
that are actively building extra-territorial political institutions. Motivating the
21 Peter Haas' conceptualization of epistemic community refers to a network of technical experts who link
international regimes to domestic policy compliance in support of convergence (1989, 377-8).
53
collaboration of authorities and experts across different regions was a shared set of
desires to legitimize fledgling democracies, identify best practices based on comparative
learning, and establish enduring electoral institutions for overseas participation. These
actors found a receptive audience and a useful venue in formal global organizations. The
leading international NGOs are the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral
Assistance (IDEA) and the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES), as well
as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the UN
Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Electoral Assistance Division (UNEAD), and
the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
The galvanizing forces behind the assembly of international bureaucratic
infrastructure have been strong national efforts to develop OV institutions together with
the global migration and remittance trends, as we see in the following photo. The image,
which shows the director of Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), Dr. José
Woldenberg, accompanied by a phalanx of international technical advisors, speaks to the
domestic political needs of Mexican leaders for credibility. In 1998 the clock was ticking
on the government's earlier promises to institutionalize electoral competition, with
migrant calls for enfranchisement one of several societal demands facing the country's
political elites (see chapter 3). Flanking Woldenberg are representatives of UNDP, IDEA,
IFES and the governments of the U.S., Canada and Spain, who came at Mexico's
invitation to share information and compare experiences with OV.
54
Dr. José Woldenberg, President of Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute, convenes the 1998 International
Seminar on Overseas Voting in Mexico City.
Photo source: IFE 1998 report.
Mexico's treatment of the issue, while a matter of particular national politics,
would combine with global patterns to support a burgeoning corpus of international
expertise in this niche area. For ten years, Mexico's IFE has been conducting rigorous
analyses of the demographic and operational realities involved in the agenda to
enfranchise overseas Mexicans.22 Its division of international affairs has collaborated
with IDEA and IFES to identify the conceptual bases of comparative analysis of OV in
practice, recently publishing a comprehensive volume and full database of all countries
and their legal-operational steps to implement OV (Ellis, Navarro et al 2007). Beyond
policy studies, the network provides ongoing technical support for national efforts to
introduce OV in cases such as Ghana and the Philippines.
Prior to the formation of the epistemic network, the overseas voting area had been
22 IFE-sponsored studies include IFE 1998, 1999, 2006, IFE-IDEA 2007, Corona and Santibañez 2004.
55
an international policy vacuum in the 1990s. Mexican authorities had gone in search of
international expertise, only to learn that none of the major IGO or international policy
organization had developed any such base of knowledge, nor had any of the countries
with experience sought to study the topic more broadly. The expert responsible for
managing the involvement of Mexico's IFE made the following observation during a
2006 interview:
... In 1996 when the reforms were made to the Mexican Constitution, it opened the
possibility of the overseas vote (in Mexico). One of the objectives established by the
international division of the IFE was to develop and to systematize a database that would
permit us to offer to the actors, to the political forces, and to the IFE's own personnel, a
mark of reference about what was the ―state of art‖ at the time: where, under what criteria,
how they were registered, how they voted. And the first thing that was seen was that it
was a theme outside of the academic agenda, outside of the policy exchange between
electoral institutions, outside of the political debate.23 (translation, italics added)
Navarro and his colleagues contacted electoral authorities in countries like Colombia,
which had been offering the vote since the 1960s. They learned that the Colombian
government managed the process in an ad hoc fashion, as an administrative routine
conducted by whoever happened to be running a certain part of the electoral bureaucracy.
OV had not been addressed according to any basic concepts or legal principles, but rather
as a practical matter. Nor were there any systematized databases or specialists to be found
in the international policy sphere.
The formation of a global policy network on overseas voting reflects the
interaction of global nations and epistemic networks at the level of the international
system. Electoral authorities in Mexico and other developing countries were explicitly
aware of diaspora participation as a missing element in national democratization efforts.
23 Author's interview with Carlos Navarro Fierro, Director of International Studies, Division of
International Affairs, IFE, Mexico City, 17 November 2006.
56
Responding to similar imperatives amidst distinct political-administrative contexts and
national experiences, they came together in international technical bodies in search of
resources for resolving their own national challenges. Their collaboration has resulted in
a new set of institutional standards for the conduct of extraterritorial politics at the
international system level, which now exist as a meaningful normative reality for other
developing countries. This process reveals how the interaction of diaspora political
entrepreneurs and national electoral authorities has been a driving force in formation of a
global policy network and its conceptual framework for OV.
Informed by democracy-rights norms that pervade elite global institutions, the
global policy network is also steeped in the operational realities of overseas voting.
Grouping together various national experiences, its policy studies have elaborated
administrative guidelines that suggest a framework for the quantitative analysis of OV.
Overseas voting (OV) analysis
The framework identifies five core characteristics of a country's overseas voting
regime: the legal basis of OV; the elections it applies to; the eligibility requirements; its
implementation including forms of registration and voting; and voter participation and
representation. The legal basis for OV in most countries takes its main shape in special
legislative statute, in addition to prior constitutional clauses and subsequent
administrative edicts. Often the electoral law establishing OV refers to a statement in (or
amendment to) the constitution that establishes, implicitly or explicitly, the citizen's right
to vote overseas. The legislation designates the authority to the electoral agency to
conduct OV, which in turns writes operational guidelines. Some laws designate more or
less authority or flexibility to the electoral agency to make decisions about
57
implementation. In a smaller number of countries, there is not a specific legislative
statute, but the legal basis of voting resides entirely in constitutional law and/or
administrative procedures.
A basic function of the electoral law is to resolve the inherent tension between the
citizen's right to vote and the authority's obligation to ensure national control of the
election. Similarly, the OV law guides the electoral agency in resolving legaladministrative complications that arise from organizing elections outside of the national
jurisdiction. There are three main types of elections that OV can apply to: national
elections; sub-national elections; and national referenda. Elections to select the national
government are the standard for whether a country offers OV or not, and they refer to
Presidential, Parliamentary and Semi-Presidential elections. In all three, countries may
also establish positions in the national legislature for diaspora citizens to elect their own
direct representatives, apart from voting for the executive, although only eight countries
do so at present.
Eligibility refers to the requirements and restrictions determining who can legally
vote from abroad. Eligibility guidelines are crucial since they establish the potential
universe of overseas voters, both legally-technically and in a practical, realistic sense.
The primary requirement is national citizenship, followed by registration.24 Additional
factors that can restrict eligibility include the voter's employment classification as well as
various time limits. Many countries limit OV to diplomatic and consular staff, or to state
employees including military forces abroad. The time limits set by states that restrict
eligibility refer to minimum and maximum times abroad. These factors are established in
24 New Zealand is the exceptional case, in which non-citizen residents traveling abroad temporarily may
register to vote in national elections via special external procedure (Navarro and Morales 2006).
58
part by the electoral law, but more often by administrative guidelines and procedures that
are not defined until implemented. Most countries require registration that usually
involves special one-time registration from abroad for the election in question. Some
countries establish a more minimal requirement of prior registration in the home country.
In a handful of cases, such as Mexico, countries require both special registration from
abroad as well as prior registration with the home country.
Implementation of overseas voting can be classified by the means of voting, with
four main types: direct voting, postal voting, proxy voting, and, increasingly, mixed
procedures. In rare cases, voting by fax or Internet is possible subject to the approval of a
special request. Direct voting in embassies and consulates has been the traditional
standard, with the act of registration and voting from abroad taking place as an individual
activity. Mass emigration coupled with democratization has re-introduced the possibility
of large-scale collective voting abroad. For logistical and political reasons, electoral
authorities are beginning to organize direct voting abroad at special sites, outside the
diplomatic buildings, in the communities where the citizen diaspora resides. In these
cases, the acts of registration and voting take on a collective character, often involving
campaign events, fundraising and advertising outside of the national territory.
Overseas voting participation has rarely exceeded 1% or 2% of the estimated
overseas citizen population of potential eligible voters. Two of the main reasons for low
participation are changing preferences of the overseas citizen voter and high obstacles to
participation. First, a significant percentage of overseas citizens lose interest due to
distance and time away from the home country. Second, logistical requirements and state
rules impose obstacles that often make it difficult, if not impossible, for interested
59
expatriates to vote from abroad. In this way, voting institutions structure participation.
Why study overseas voting if participation is so low? Electorally significant
interventions by overseas voters have generally been the exception rather than the rule
(South Africa 1994, Italy 2006, US 2000 and 2008). However, recent cases of significant
overseas returns together with the global growth of mobilized expatriates point to the
possibility that diaspora voting will exert strategic stakes more frequently in the future.
First, though, the analysis needs to focus upon diaspora citizens, whose interest in
participation will exceed diaspora community defined broadly by ethnic identification.
Diaspora citizens tend to travel home and own property or firms with business in the
home country at a higher level than do diaspora nationals (Marcelli & Cornelius 2005).
Among Mexican diaspora citizens, for example, recent surveys show a large majority
expressing interest in voting in Mexico's presidential elections, confirming providing
evidence of a much greater potential for participation than the 1 to 2%.25
Even when diaspora citizens are interested, restrictive rules and the absence of
political party organization abroad limit overseas turnout. An ―election of state‖ is much
more likely in the overseas realm, due to the institution of territoriality, which requires
the involvement of foreign ministry offices and consulates. In India, for example,
electoral rules formally exclude participation by non-state employees, guaranteeing a
purely consular vote. Even in countries that have begun to implement measures aimed at
enabling overseas citizen participation, voting remains difficult and costly for diaspora
citizens, most of whom lack basic information about deadlines for registration. Electoral
agencies and political parties, whose function it is to inform and register voters, remain
25 87% of Mexican immigrants surveyed in March 2005 indicated an interest in voting in Mexico's
Presidential election of 2006 (Pew Hispanic Center Survey 2005).
60
unorganized and inactive outside the national territory.
Overseas turnout is measured in different ways and influenced by a variety of
factors. Historically, it has been quite small—although at the same time, some would
prohibit overseas voting because of the presumed potential for decisiveness.26 However,
looking at turnout levels in isolation obscures the dynamic, multi-faceted character of
cross-border democratic participation. Voting is just one key part, and participation
snapshots belie the context. Overseas participation levels vary not only across democratic
countries, but also within them over time, often changing significantly from one cycle to
the next. The analysis of extraterritorial participation needs to consider the central factors
of democratic norms and institution-building within the polity. As U.S. experience shows,
voting rules and party activity affect participation rates of voters who send absentee
ballots (Oliver 1996). As well, recent research has documented a strong interest among
Mexican diaspora citizens in voting from abroad (McCann et al 2006). Upon fuller
analysis, the puzzling gap between voter interest and actual participation confirms the
importance of electoral institutions.
Furthermore, overseas participation levels need not be ―decisive‖ to have an
impact. Low participation may signal shifts in contestation to other political venues and
issues. As process-tracing will explore, small increases in voting levels may exert
26 The notion of decisiveness is most relevant to situations of deadlocked elections, in which overseas
returns can affect the outcome. In some close elections in recent years, the winner's margin of victory
relied on the net count of overseas votes, such as the 2000 U.S. Presidential election in Florida and
Italy‘s Parliamentary elections of 2006 (won by George W. Bush and L‘Ulivo, respectively). Since
voting in democratic elections is simultaneous and cumulative, every vote is equally important – every
vote is a marginal vote regardless of its origin abroad or at home. While one vote or one set of votes
does not ―decide‖ or ―determine‖ an election outcome, it can greatly affect close races. The cognitive
shorthand for such situations is ―decisive‖ or ―pivotal.‖ For example, returns with an evenly divided
domestic count can reveal distinctive preferences within the diaspora, which can ―tip the balance.‖ The
notion of decisiveness grips people's thinking so much that rational choice theorists of voting behavior
have cited the fear of negatively ―determining‖ the outcome by not voting as a main reason people
undertake costly efforts to vote.
61
qualitative effects upon state discourse, agendas and policies -- since votes may be
accompanied with funds, political support, or arguments. Therefore, this analysis of
overseas voting incorporates and builds upon existing comparative studies across
countries (Navarro et al 2007), which take as a starting premise the idea that institutions
structure participation including turnout levels. This study thus compares the politics of
overseas voting institutions, both internally with analyses of key processes as well as
externally in its quantitative comparison of cases in the global universe.
Academic studies
A small but growing body of scholarship on overseas voting has begun to map out
normative and empirical questions raised by the topic, in two disparate tracks of conceptbuilding theorization and detailed empirical process-tracing based on single case
histories. Normative political issues include ideas of citizenship and national community,
and the associated forms of territorializing national politics. Transnationalist scholars
have linked OV to the ―globalization from below‖ thesis, which hails the agency of labor
migrant communities and their use of informal spaces to undermine state power
(Moctezuma 2004, 108). Election procedures require state sanction, however. Evidence
from case studies suggests that for states sullied and weakened by massive emigration
and ―brain drain,‖ OV may be a tool to re-establish state legitimacy and authority.
Leticia Calderón (2004) makes a broad, ambitious argument that overseas voting
illustrates a fundamental transformation of modern political institutions wrought by
globalization. Her research combines conceptual brush-clearing with carefully
documented individual case studies. Calderón identifies the overseas voting trend as the
outgrowth of two large-scale processes of international migration and democratization.
62
Reviewing the reform experiences of 17 countries mainly from Latin America as well as
the U.S., Canada, Spain and Portugal, she discusses the ways in which OV is
transforming a large number of important topics such as territoriality, nationality,
citizenship, identity, sovereignty, human rights, political party competitiveness, and civil
society, among others. Calderón classifies countries on the basis of where they stand in
relation to the two-stage process: i) countries without a law; ii) countries with a law but
without rules implemented; and iii) countries that have implemented OV. Rather than
seeking out a general pattern to explain OV outcomes across cases, her analysis focuses
on distinct national processes and serves to generate this set of broader hypotheses about
normative effects, the testing of which remains somewhat underdeveloped.
The largely descriptive empirical works have analyzed the topic in relation to
complex and varied historical processes of diaspora formation in particular countries.
Research on Mexico's state-diaspora politics points out two alternative views. On the one
hand, rationalist institutionalists such as Parra (2005) focus their analysis of OV
exclusively upon domestic politics, emphasizing low participation levels and
downplaying the topic in general. In an interesting counterpoint, McCann et al (2007)
focus on the Mexican diaspora and conclude on a more positive note about the future
potential for overseas voter participation Their recent survey research on civic
engagement of overseas Mexicans in Dallas, Los Angeles and northern Indiana suggests
that a considerable part of the 11 million overseas Mexicans has a strong interest in longdistance electoral participation.
The conclusions from the two Mexico analyses remain case-specific but contain
implications for the global analysis. First, the highly contested nature of Mexico's
63
legislative process in 2005, along with the strategic behavior of its parties, points out the
importance of domestic political processes and structures to OV rules adopted by states in
general. This point forms the basis of the first hypothesis tested in the quantitative
analysis related to political competitiveness. Secondly, McCann et al's findings support
the dissertation's approach to the study of Mexico's OV rules i) as a process and ii) as a
case relevant to the global level. They conclude that OV may emerge as a genuine
political force in Mexico despite the extremely low participation in 2006, that there is an
ample reservoir of civic potential among Mexican expatriates for participating in future
elections, that voter attitudes and civic engagement levels of expatriate Mexicans tend to
mirror those of Mexicans in the home country, and that therefore all three parties have
potential for developing overseas support despite the lopsided 2006 tally favoring the
PAN government party (2007a). The authors‘ findings will be read closely in Mexico and
its diaspora, where they provide support for those favoring ongoing expansion of the OV
rules.
The Mexico case has been influential beyond its own polity in driving the effort to
identify global standards for national OV reform. Any moves by Mexico beyond its
restrictive reform would affect the global context for other countries' actions on the
question. In any case, the research illustrates how a country's OV rules should not be
understood as a frozen outcome, but rather as part of an institution that evolves over time
according to national experience and learning. The clear research challenge is to extend
analysis beyond the Mexico case to cross-national analyses at regional and global levels.
64
II
Research design and hypotheses
Quantitative analysis looks at state institutions at legislative and implementation
stages: first, whether a state has passed law(s) to establish the rights and authority to
conduct OV in national elections, removing any legal obstacles to overseas ballots; and
second, whether implementation of OV sets open rules aimed at making electoral
participation accessible for all of the overseas citizens.
The time-series models and selection models both include the two stages of
legislation and implementation, which form linked binary outcomes in respective logit
and probit regression equations. Based upon the historical review, the models test three
main pairs of hypotheses related to political openness, remittances and expatriate
population, in addition to a number of control variables. The first model is a time-series
cross-section analysis of the 130 most populous states across eight five-year intervals
from 1970 to 2004. Due to the sequential relationship of legislation and implementation
in OV institution-building, the second stage model encounters a potential problem of
selection bias, since only those countries that have established the legal right and
authority required for OV can implement open voting. This calls for caution in assigning
causal significance to any findings on the second question.
To avoid selection bias, the analysis runs a second test of the two-stage process
using a Heckman selection model, which is formulated to account for the standard errors
in the first stage, as well as missing cases of countries that did not have a voting law. The
selection model tested here is limited to the 2000 and 2004 cycles. Apart from its
improved model specification, the second test also was run on revised population
estimates based on a newly available global database of expatriate population estimates
65
by country, as well as my own complete revision of the coding of the outcome variable
based on sources noted. Neither revised set of values for the two factors saw major
changes. Overall, even with the differences in the two tests -- in the basic formula, in the
time periods tested, and in the use of revised data in two variables -- they result in similar
findings for a number of the main hypotheses and control factors.
Research questions, dependent variables
The two related questions addressed in this chapter each revolve around a
particular binary dependent variable. The questions are:
1. What factors are associated with states' moves to establish the right to vote in
national elections for overseas citizens?
2. What factors are associated with the implementation of overseas voting with
open rules?
Stage
Tag
Dependent Variable
Indicator
1
OV_Law Voting law
passage of overseas voting law, constitutional
amendment and/or removal of legal obstacles
2
OV_Open Open implementation
open rules for eligibility, registration, voting
1. Legislation: Overseas voting law. The first dependent variable is whether a country
has established adequate legal grounds for OV to take place or not, or in other words
whether a state has established the legal right and authority required for overseas citizen
voting. This outcome is based on both of the following two conditions:
first, there exists explicit the law(s) establishing the right of citizens to vote overseas and
the authority of the electoral agency to conduct such elections; and
second, that there are no legal grounds, i.e. discrepant clauses or missing legislation, to
prohibit or prevent the national electoral agency from organizing overseas voting.
The most common characteristic is the passage of a constitutional clause or amendment,
which explicitly establishes the rights of citizens to vote abroad, followed by a subsequent
66
legislative statute designating the electoral agency to carry out the overseas election and
authorizing it to conduct and regulate related activities.
2. Implementation: Openness of voting rules. Once a state passes an OV law, it then
must implement the law and define specific rules governing the vote abroad. The
outcome in the second question is whether a country's voting institution as implemented
is open or restrictive to the full participation of all overseas citizens. As a country moves
to implement its OV law, the state formulates rules that guide diaspora participation in the
election campaign and voting abroad. Depending upon the details, the particular voting
rules selected may allow for a fuller or a lesser participation of the entire citizen diaspora.
The original dataset used in this analysis features coding of the dependent variable
by the author on the basis of four main sources (see Appendix 1).27 As shown in Table 2.2,
the specific criteria for determining the openness of the voting institution as implemented
refer to i) eligibility requirements, ii) registration guidelines, iii) voting means, iv)
campaign regulations, and v) representative institutions for the overseas population.
A positive value for open voting is characterized by a citizen-oriented overseas
election open to the entire range of overseas citizens and accessible through mixed
options of voting means. By contrast, voting rules considered to be restrictive were those
that either limited eligibility to specific occupational classes of overseas citizens (such as
consular officials or military employees), limited eligibility based upon time outside of
the country, targeted government employees exclusively, offered extremely limited
locations and means of voting, required an onerous paperwork and registration process,
or significantly barred migrant candidacies for representative offices altogether.
27 Ellis et al 2007, Navarro and Morales 2006, Navarro 2003, CESOP 2003. Readers interested in
reviewing coding decisions, including first-hand review of the data set, are invited to contact me.
Appendix I details coding rules used, along with a number of cases with uncertain outcomes.
67
Most cases featured a combination of open and restricted voting rules. Coding
was conducted according to the basic criterion identified above: the overall extent to
Table 2.2
Characteristics of voting rules
Open
Restrictive
-- open to all overseas citizens
-- no time limits on minimum or
maximum stay
-- restricted to state, military staff
-- specified employment classes only
-- maximum time periods abroad
-- minimum time periods abroad
means of voting
-- choice of voting options, sites
-- collective voting possible
-- public voting at third site
-- one option for voting only
-- individualistic voting only
-- direct voting in consulate
registration
-- possible from abroad
-- voting credentials issued abroad
-- simple forms at multiple sites
-- extended deadlines
-- free of fees and costs
-- promotion by civic groups
-- requires travel to home country
-- voting credentials NOT issued abroad
-- confusing forms, limited distribution
-- restrictive deadlines
-- fees, costs for documents, postage
-- not promoted in society
campaign
regulations
-- run by citizen electoral agency
-- unrestricted campaigns abroad
-- fundraising activities permitted
-- candidate visits
-- campaign advertising
-- run by government (consulates)
-- bans on overseas campaigning
-- fundraising prohibited
-- candidate visits prohibited
-- advertising banned or restricted
representation
-- electoral districts for diaspora
-- representatives for diaspora
-- explicit limits on extraterritorial
participation; residence requirements; no
representatives for diaspora
eligibility
which the different rules in the country's OV institution favor a fuller participation by the
citizen diaspora. Guiding the coding was the proximity of a country's overall institution
to one of two types: on the one hand, a closed overseas vote that is not advertised or
accessible to the overall citizen body abroad, entirely limited to government officers or to
a narrow elite segment including a small number of upper-middle-class individuals; or,
alternatively, an open overseas election that is accessible to the full range of the citizen
diaspora, enabling the possibility of large-scale participation and other campaign
activities abroad.
68
Explanatory Factors
As listed in Table 2.3, the independent variables tested in the quantitative analysis
are political openness (competitiveness and rights), the age of the regime, the estimated
size of the overseas population absolutely and as a percentage of the national population,
remittances in absolute value and in relation to the national economy, along with a
dummy variable for whether a country is undergoing a post-conflict regime change under
the occupation of an international coalition. Control variables included population and
national income.
Table 2.3
Independent Variables
Explanatory Factor
Indicator and Source
1.
Political openness
Polity2 score for competition and rights
(Polity IV dataset)
2.
Regime age
Years since last regime transition
(―Durable‖ figure in Polity IV dataset)
3.
Expatriate citizens, estimated
Author's estimates based on UN Population data
(see Appendix II)
4.
National population
Population data (UN and World Bank)
5.
% of population abroad
Estimated citizen diaspora / national population
6.
Remittances
Remittances (World Bank WDI, central banks)
7.
GDP
GDP (World Bank WDI)
8.
Remittance dependency
Remittances as a percentage of GDP
9.
Post-conflict intervention
U.N. post-conflict occupation
(known cases, review of Polity IV coding)
Hypotheses
The explanatory factors involved in the hypotheses presented are openness,
expatriate population size, and remittances. The additional factors listed in Table 2.1 are
also discussed below. In some cases, the hypothesized effect of the variable is the same
upon the voting law outcome as it is upon implementation, in terms of the direction of the
69
effect anticipated. In others, a given factor may have divergent effects—that is, it may be
expected to push in one direction regarding a voting law, but in the other regarding
implementation.
Hypothesis 1: political openness (competition and rights) in the country's
domestic political system will be positively associated with both OV law and open
implementation. This hypothesis is based on the idea that political competition between
parties will spur parties to offer a voting law as a means of gaining political and financial
support of overseas citizens. Competition between parties will spur them to support open
voting rules so that they can seek votes abroad. As well, political rights generally favor
the capacities of migrant actors to access home country political arenas and to pressure
governments on voting reform.
The model also tests regime age, a factor related to political openness and likely
to be associated with both outcomes in a similarly direct and positive manner, although
less powerfully. Without labor export, for most countries, expanding the franchise abroad
has been a secondary task within the political reform agenda, addressed through
incremental legislative advances over the course of decades in liberal democracies.
Industrialized democracies, which tend to develop longer-term regimes than poorer
countries, have pioneered OV institutions, suggesting a direct and positive relationship,
along with certain instances of developing countries that do consolidate democratic rule
over time. However, many long-lasting regimes have also been authoritarian and little
disposed to OV institutions, a fact likely to muddy results for this factor. As well, in the
other direction, growing ranks of recent democratizers have implemented OV in a
relatively rapid fashion, another fact likely to constrain the potential impact of regime age
70
as a causal factor.
Hypothesis 2: the greater the number of the estimated overseas citizen population,
the more likely a positive value on the voting law outcome. A voting law offers politicians
a cheap way of appealing to a large body of overseas voters. Passage of a law followed
by failure to implement may be the best solution for certain incumbent interests, as in
Mexico from 1998 through 2004. It is unclear how greater numbers of estimated overseas
citizens should be expected to affect open implementation. On the one hand, having more
citizens abroad means logistical obstacles and political concerns about extending the
franchise, with the potential voting clout of large overseas populations threatening
incumbent political leaders who face opposition in the diaspora. Thus, a greater diaspora
population may work against open implementation. On the other hand, greater masses
abroad may lend weight to migrant leader claims' for open voting rules, and in certain
circumstances, they may be seen as an object of political gain by politicians. Regarding
open implementation, more overseas citizens may generate: i) a greater fear of open
rules; and/or ii) a greater and more forceful demand for open rules.
Two related factors that I also test are overall national population size and
percentage of the national population composed by diaspora citizens. It is not
automatically apparent how we should expect either of these factors to affect OV
institutions. On the one hand, more populous countries may be less preoccupied and
influenced by their overseas communities -- and therefore less likely to institute OV.
Similarly, greater economies of scale may make states with large populations more likely
to have developed hierarchical state structures, which in turn become oriented to
controlling and blocking diaspora participation, as in the case of Mexico, rather than
71
inviting its democratic participation. But large populations do not necessarily indicate
strongly institutionalized states and exclusive politics, nor vice versa.
One region-level analysis suggests that population is indeterminate as a causal
factor. Table 2.4 shows how the twenty-one most populous Latin American countries fall
into four categories of OV. The range of national population in 2005 runs along the xaxis; the openness of OV is captured by a four point scale along the y-axis.
72
Table 2.4
Country size and OV in Latin America28
Country Size (Population) and Overseas Voting
3.5
Voting Reform
3
2.5
2
Column D
1.5
1
0.5
0
0
50,000,000
100,000,000
150,000,000
200,000,000
Population, 2005
Key to Y-axis, Voting Reform scoring for Table 5.0 (0-3)
3: countries offering full extraterritorial voting rights and somewhat accessible processes. (Arg, Br, Col,
DR, Ec, H, Pe, V)
2: intermediate cases: countries w/right to vote law but not implementing a fully accessible legislation. (Ch,
M, N, Pan)
1: counties without right to vote overseas legally established (Bo, CR, ES, G, Ha, J, Par, U)
0: countries not allowing elections domestically (Cu).
The experience in Latin America shows little evidence of any clear link between
population size and either of the two outcomes. While states with larger population sizes
may be more likely to have passed a voting law, as the table above suggests, the mixed
record of small countries on legislation confounds any findings of correlation. As well,
population size also appears to be indeterminate in relation to the implementation of open
28 Sources of the voting reform data used to create Table 5.0 are Calderón 2005, Navarro 2002, and
government sites (Ecuador). Country population data comes from the World Bank World Development
Indicators database.
73
OV in Latin America, with a range of small and large countries occupying the third
position.
Hypothesis 3: Remittances are likely to be positively associated with both an OV
law and with open institutions, since they will spur home country leaders to support
migrant-friendly positions in pursuit of support, and since they signal diaspora
capacities. While remittances' cash content flows directly to family members at the
household level, they affect the home country polity in several ways, as discussed in
chapter 1. First, remittances enter the public arena as a political fact through the balance
of payment statistics monitored by the country's central bank and the IMF, making policy
elites aware of the diaspora's economic importance to the country. Second, when senders'
communicate new political information to their family members at home, politicians soon
perceive the importance of remittances not just to social stability inside the country but
also to the welfare, livelihoods and political persuasions of voters. Recognizing potential
political gains and seeking the approval of those who depend upon remittance-sending
nationals, politicians are likely to adopt a migrant-friendly discourse and an openness to
OV. Through these political effects, I expect that more remittances will spur major
discursive shifts leading to OV legislation.
The hypothesis about remittances' importance to open implementation stems from
their political relevance as material resource base and as an indicator of the diaspora's
growing human and organizational capacities. Independent of political agendas within
diaspora and home country, the increasing economic productivity of migrant labor
communities is politically important, since it indicates a growing base of potential
support for effective political organization. First, growing remittance flows signal to
74
transnational political entrepreneurs untapped grounds for new claims-making
opportunities, as well as politically valuable resource havens abroad. The greater a
country's volume of remittances, then the greater the human and organizational resources
associated with its diaspora individuals and groups. Thus, emigrant diasporas with more
remittances will be more effective in advocating for OV.
Higher levels of gross domestic product (GDP) are included as a control factor,
since they are also somewhat ambiguous. Richer states are more likely to participate in
the international institutions that favor OV standards and measure their implementation.
Industrialized democracies have upheld legal commitments to implement OV over time.
However, many of them also limit participation through various restrictive rules. In any
case, political openness not national income is the factor at work here.
Remittance dependency, defined as the percentage of the national economy taken
up by economic remittances sent from abroad, is a compound variable and thus may be
problematic in registering significance. On the one hand, it is expected that more
remittances will favor both outcomes, as reasoned above in hypothesis #3, namely the
potential for greater appeal and capacities within the home country political arena for
remittance diasporas; on the other hand, higher GDP would reduce the amount of a
country's score for remittance dependency and the likelihood of significant impact, as
long as GDP is not negatively associated with the outcome.
The final factor tested is post-conflict humanitarian intervention, since that has
been a major initiative coloring national politics in one type of OV case. The quantity of
cases makes it unlikely that this factor will have any statistical impact, however in a
number of cases, humanitarian intervention has been associated with OV laws and
75
elections. Cases such as Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor, among others, are all
instances of recent international intervention in which OV became an important part of
the occupying regime's post-conflict reconstruction agenda. The epistemic community on
OV now emerging represents an increasingly influential authority for late adopters.
Indicators and data sources
The empirical work in this chapter analyzes the quantitative importance of
estimated diaspora scale, since the reliability and completeness of UN data on migrant
stocks are problematic. Acknowledging this limitation, this chapter draft includes revised
estimates of overseas populations based in part on a Sussex University migration figures
for 2000 that represent the state of the art in international migration policy analysis. 29
Appendices II and III detail the particular indicators, data sources and coding
criteria referenced in Table 2.1 and used below. The object was to include all countries
with populations over 1 million in 2004 for each of the two time ranges; 150 nation-states
met the population threshold. In total, the research was able to obtain data and/or
construct well-founded estimates for 130 of the 150 most populous countries. Since the
migration data that was available by country comes at five-year intervals, the time-series
panels were based on cumulative flows for country-years at 5-year intervals for the
period from 1970 through 2004.30
III
Quantitative analysis and findings
Table 2.5 presents descriptive data for all of the variables for both models, with
the larger population of time-series data on the left, alongside data for the two-stage
29 According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), the Sussex dataset contains the most complete and
reliable emigration estimates, though its accuracy is limited as with any state-generated migration
counts (MPI, telephone interview, 17 August 2008). Appendix II discusses the estimates used here.
30 Appendix II lists the dropped countries and explains why their absence does not bias the analysis.
76
selection model for the 2000 and 2004 periods on the right. Both sides include the same
two binary dependent variables of voting law and open implementation, along with the
nine explanatory factors tested. For both models, the universe refers to the recent and
contemporary experience of modern states for the time periods indicated. The countryyears under investigation are not a representative sample of a larger population; they are
the population. This means that the logit and probit regression coefficients of the
population is an estimate of itself (Podestá 2002).
Time-series data: For the eight panels from 1970 through 2004, the mean value
of the voting law dependent variable is just 0.34. This indicates that across the 671
country-year units fewer than half had seen the passage an OV law, while 34% of the
years did register a positive value reflecting the prior passage of a law. Even lower values
were reported for open implementation, with a mean value of 0.133. This indicates that
only about one seventh of country-years observed in the historical period had open
implementation in place.
For the independent variables in the 1970-2004 time-series, political openness
shows a large standard deviation of 7.94 from the mean of 2.05, reflecting the variance in
regime types present in the population studied, all of the world's states. The mean regime
age was 23.7 years with a larger standard deviation of nearly 30 years.
The mean value of the historic expatriate population estimates for all countryyears was just over 1 million persons, with a large standard deviation of approximately 2
million. The largest estimate for citizen diaspora was 18.2 million, and the minimum
estimate was 0. National population data showed a mean value of 45 million with a
standard deviation of 143 million. The low of 500,000 refers to Kuwait and United Arab
77
Emirates in 1970 (countries that had grown to populations of 2.2 million and 4.3 million
in 2004). The maximum value in the population size of 1.3 billion refers to China in
2004.
Historically, the percentage of national population abroad showed a mean value
of 6.5% across the 671 country-years, with a standard deviation of 9.0%. Reviewing the
global total, double-digit values were not infrequent, with traumatic events such as war or
state failure generating massive flight reflected in numbers above 20%. The maximum
value of 77% refers to Cyprus in 1995, when UN data indicated an estimated 537,000
Cypriots abroad, compared to 700,000 national population reported by the World Bank.
Historical remittance data showed a mean value of $908 million US dollars per
country year, with a larger standard deviation of $1.92 billion. The minimum value of $1
million was registered for multiple country-years, and the maximum remittance value per
country year of $19.8 billion referred to India in 2004. Remittance dependency data
showed a mean percentage of remittances to gross domestic product of 3.36, with a
standard deviation of 7.74%. The minimum value of 0.002% referred to Venezuela in
1985, while the maximum value of 81.6% referred to Lesotho in 1975. The GDP data
across all country-years showed a mean value of $200 billion, with a standard deviation
of $830 billion. The minimum value of 11.5 million refers to the GDP of the Gambia in
1975, while the maximum value of $11.7 trillion refers to U.S. GDP in the year 2004. The
data for Post-conflict intervention show a mean value of only 0.015. This value indicates
that the condition of being occupied by an international coalition following a conflict
situation characterized a mere 1.5% of the historical country-year cases observed.
Selection model data: The two-stage model began with 255 country-year
78
observations from the two time periods of 2000 and 2004. Of these, 145 adopted an OV
law, and 109 did not. Collinearity tests of the independent variables against one another
were mainly negative and confirmatory of the model. The highest overlap occurred from
regressing national population on remittances, which resulted in an R-squared value of
0.43, as well as expatriates on remittances, resulting in 0.42; values for all other
combinations were below 0.20.
The mean political openness had increased to a Polity score of 4.24, with a
standard deviation of 6.22, and the regime age was up to 26.0 with a standard deviation
of 31.9 years. The mean value of expatriate citizens was 1.3 million with a standard
deviation of 2.0 million, while the mean national population was 46.2 million, with a
standard deviation of 149 million, resulting in a mean percentage of population abroad of
6.7% and a standard deviation of 8.6%. For the selection model periods from 2000 and
2004, the mean remittance value by country-year was $1.39 billion, with a standard
deviation of $2.74 billion, while the mean GDP was $278 billion, with a standard
deviation of $1.08 trillion. This resulted in a mean national remittance dependency ratio
of 3.2%, with a standard deviation of 5.0%. The mean value of 0.02 referred to the postconflict intervention data for the two periods, which characterized a mere 2% of all
country-years in the two periods analyzed.
Table 2.5
Descriptive data
Time-series analysis, 1970 - 2004
Variable
Heckman selection model, 2000 & 2004
# Obs
Mean
Std. Dev.
Min
Max
# Obs
Mean
Std.
Dev.
Min
Max
Outcome
Voting Law
671
0.34
0.47
0
1
255
0.55
0.50
0
1
Variables
Open implementation
671
0.13
0.34
0
1
145
0.49
0.50
0
1
Political openness
663
2.94
7.05
-10
10
2.54
4.24
6.22
-9
10
Regime age
668
23.7
29.8
0
195
254
26.0
31.9
0
195
Expatriate citizen
population, est.
671
1.03
million
2.02
million
0
18.2
mill.
255
1.31
million
2.0
million
0
12.1
million
Population, total
671
44.9
million
143
million
0.50
mill.
1,300
million
255
46.2
million
14.9
million
671
6.5
9.9
0
76.7
255
6.7
8.6
0
40.0
Remittances, US$
671
0.91
billion
1.92
billion
0
19.8
bill.
255
1.39
billion
2.74
billion
0
19.8
billion
GDP, US$
665
200
billion
830
billion
0.01
bill.
11,700
bill.
255
278
billion
1,080
billion
0.22
billion
11,700
billion
Remittance
dependency (% gdp)
659
3.4
7.7
0
81.6
255
3.2
5.0
0
29.3
Post-conflict
intervention
671
0.02
0.12
0
1
255
0.02
0.14
0
1
Independent % of population
abroad, est.
Variables
79
1
1,300
million million
80
Results
Table 2.6 summarizes output for the different models.31 It is appropriate to review
each column separately prior to reviewing each of the explanatory factors in light of the
hypotheses.
Voting Law, time-series: The value for Rho indicates that the factors tested are
correlated with 0.69 of the total variance in the dependent variable. Results of the timeseries logistical analysis for 653 country-years across the 130 panels found that: i)
political competition in the home country was positively correlated with having an OV
law and statistically significant below the 0.01 level; ii) the estimated amount of
expatriates was not correlated with having a voting law; iii) remittance volumes were
positively correlated with having a voting law at the 0.01 level; iv) national population
was negatively correlated with the voting law below the 0.01 level; and v) regime age,
percent of population abroad, and GDP were all positively correlated with the voting law
outcome and statistically significant below the 0.05 level, while remittance dependency
or post-conflict intervention were not significant
Open Implementation, time-series: The Rho value of 0.63 indicates the factors tested
are associated with that much of the total variance in implementation. Time-series
logistical analysis for all 653 country-years across the 130 panels found that: i) political
competition in the home country was positively correlated with open implementation and
statistically significant below the 0.01 level; ii) the estimated amount of expatriates was
negatively associated with open implementation below 0.05; iii) remittance volumes were
positively correlated with open implementation below 0.01; iv) national population was
31 See Appendix I for details of each model including regression coefficients.
81
negatively correlated with open implementation below 0.01; and v) the correlation
between regime age and open implementation was weaker below the 0.10 level, while
percentage of population abroad, remittance dependency, and post-conflict intervention
were all not correlated with open implementation.
Selection model
The second test for the country-years 2000 and 2004 confirms and addresses the
issue of selection bias. Conventional probit analysis is likely to mis-estimate the effects
of the theoretically specified variables, since it forces one to either truncate the selection
and omit the cases without a voting law or to lump them into the analysis even though
they did not have an implementation stage.32 The Heckman selection model is set up to
account for the standard errors in the first stage and thereby provide more accurate
estimates in the outcome equation on open institutions.33 For the 255 country-years in the
analysis, 109 did not pass a voting law and did not enter the implementation stage. For
the 145 country-years with a voting law analyzed in stage two, 65 had open
implementation and 80 did not.
To identify factors involved in the voting law outcome, the simple probit model
labeled ―OV_Law‖ in the third column on Table 2.6 confirmed four factors to be
statistically significant for the 255 country-year units analyzed. As a whole, the model
correctly classified 72% of the 255 voting law outcomes according to a test of predicted
probabilities, generating a similar 60.5% score on a second marginal effects test. First,
political openness is positively correlated with an OV law and highly statistically
32 The model presented in column 2 skirts this shortcoming by defining its question as whether or not a
country implements open voting without regard to passing an overseas voting law -- and so is less
precisely targeted.
33 Plümper et al (2006) apply a Heckman probit model in similar fashion in their recent cross-national
analysis of European Union enlargement as a two-stage process involving application and accession.
82
significant. In addition, the estimated amount of expatriates and the national domestic
population were both correlated with the voting law outcome below the 0.05 level,
although in different directions. The other variables tested were not significantly
correlated with the voting law outcome: remittance volumes; percentage of the
population abroad; GDP; and post-conflict intervention.
Summarized in column four ―OV_Open‖ of Table 2.6, the Heckman probit
selection model regresses the all of the independent variables on the probability of open
implementation, and as well it includes the selection equation and its dependent variable
of voting law. The Rho score of -1.0 indicates a perfect correlation between having a
voting law and being chosen into the second step. A Wald test shows the whole selection
model to be highly significant, indicating that the null hypothesis that all coefficients
jointly equal zero can be rejected.
Reviewing the explanatory variables associated with open implementation in 2000
and 2004: political openness is positive and highly statistically significant; remittances
are positively correlated below the 0.05 level; national population is negatively correlated
below the 0.01 level; and estimated amount of expatriates is also found to be negatively
associated at the 0.10 level of statistical significance. Also, regime age, national
population, percentage abroad, as well as GDP, remittance dependency and post-conflict
intervention all proved not to be correlated with open implementation in any statistically
significant way in the latest test.
This model is more accurately specified, and it was run on revised figures based
on more accurate underlying data and revised coding of the dependent variable.
Interestingly, while statistically significant, the model's equation captures less of the
83
variance in the implementation values than it does on the voting law stage. Whereas the
first model had a 60.5% score on the marginal effects test, the outcome equation had a
27.4%. This points to a good deal of unexplained variance on open implementation. It
will also be useful to look further at these post-estimation techniques to measure its
overall goodness of fit and adjust the model accordingly. Further refinement including
rescaling of values will also allow for more precise statements about predicted
probabilities involving individual explanatory factors.
84
Table 2.6
Independent
Variable
Summary Results
Time-Series Probit Tests,
1970 - 2004
Selection model, 2000 & 2004
OV_Law
OV_Law
OV_Open
OV_Open
(Heckman probit)
Political openness
+ ***
+ ***
+ ***
+ ***
Regime age
+ **
+*
nss
nss
Expatriates, est.
nss
- **
+ **
-*
Population
- ***
- ***
- **
-***
% Expatriates, est.
+ **
nss
nss
nss
Remittances
+ ***
+ ***
nss
+ **
GDP
+ **
+ ***
nss
nss
Remittance
dependency
nss
nss
-*
nss
Post-conflict
intervention
nss
nss
nss
nss
OVLaw
na
na
na
+ ***
Constant
- ***
- ***
- ***
- ***
# groups
130
130
na
na
# of observations
653
653
254
109 censored
145 uncensored
5.8 (1, 8)
5.0 (1, 8)
na
na
0.685 (0.038)
0.634 (0.050)
na
-1.00 (0.000)
-263.31
-149.48
-137.61
-102.51
Obs. per group avg
(min, max)
Rho
Log likelihood
nss: not statistically significant
na: not applicable
* p < 0.1; ** p < 0.05; *** p < 0.01
85
Main findings and interpretation
In reading the results and evaluating earlier hypotheses, statistical significance
levels as well as the sign of coefficients tell us about each factor in relation to the two
linked outcomes across the two tests and their respective time periods. The main findings
were:
1) First, evidence from all tests confirmed hypothesis #1 that political competition is
positively associated with both OV law and open rules, both in the time-series
analysis across thirty-five years as well as the selection model in the two recent
periods. Regime age is positively associated with both OV law and open rules in
the historical time-series since 1970, but not in the 2000 and 2004 periods.
2) Results from both tests confirmed hypothesis #2 regarding expatriate population
estimates, which tend to be positively associated with voting laws but negatively
associated with open implementation. Findings from the selection model indicated
that countries with larger expatriate populations were more likely to have OV
laws than not for the 2000 and 2004 periods, with statistical significance at the
level of 0.05. In both tests, the estimated amount of expatriate citizen is negatively
correlated and statistically significant with open implementation.
3) As hypothesized, remittance volumes are significantly and positively correlated
with open implementation across both time periods. Also, remittances have been
significantly correlated with a voting law in recent history, but not in the present
decade.
4) National population is highly negatively correlated with both outcomes.
Additionally, the results indicate that: regime age and GDP were significant and
86
positively correlated with both outcomes in the time series, but not in the present decade;
expatriates as a percentage of the population was significant only in relation to voting law
in the time series; remittance dependency was significant in relation to voting law in the
present decade but not in the other tests; and post-conflict intervention was not significant
in any of the tests.
These findings confirm the dissertation's basic design while they also point out
interesting contrasts in OV patterns between the two time periods. Robust positive
correlations for political openness across all tests likely stem from multiple causal
dynamics. As hypothesized, more electoral competitiveness is likely to create stronger
incentives for politicians to pursue untapped resources as well as greater opportunities for
migrant activists. The importance of political openness across all tests indicates the
enduring power of these mechanisms across different decades. It stands in contrasts with
regime age, which shows significance in the historical time series but not in the present
decade. The insignificance of regime age in the present decade likely stems from the
participation of many new democracies in the recent OV trend.
The estimated amount of a country's expatriate citizens shows an interesting sign
change in the present decade. Greater amounts of expatriates are associated with a higher
probability of having a voting law, but they make open implementation less likely. The
data suggest that as the overseas voting process moves forward beyond the first stage, a
domestic fear factor may arise in countries with larger diasporas, outweighing
opportunistic attitudes within the home country political actors. In other words, in
countries with many million nationals abroad, politicians may authorize OV in principle,
but when it comes to implementation, more massive diasporas create political
87
uncertainties and logistical challenges leading them to risk aversion.34
National population stands out for its consistently negative correlations with both
outcomes, as well as the greater levels of significance than expatriate citizens. The larger
the home country population, the less likely it is to pass a voting law and implement open
rules. The negative relationship presents a puzzle that calls for further attention to the
data. While some of the ten largest national populations are non-democracies, across the
entire dataset population had almost zero correlation with political openness in the
country-years tested in the selection equation models. Rather than an absence of political
openness in large countries, population stands for something else that appears to be at
work; likely factors include domestic political agendas as well as strong state hierarchies.
Diaspora actors may find it more difficult to gain political traction in larger countries,
while at the same time larger populations tend to support more institutionalized state
structures that feature well developed professional diplomatic services prone to
monopolizing political spaces in the abroad.
Global analysis indicates a complex relationship between expatriate population
and national population with regard to OV as a two-stage process. Generally, the two
factors work in different directions in affecting legislation, while they both work against
open implementation. The extent of variance in each factor in addition to the change of
direction in the expatriate citizens factor meant that the composite variable of percent of
population abroad was not statistically significant in three of the four models. Therefore,
it is best to analyze each factor in relation to the outcome separately, and not to combine
them in a composite variable.
34 See Table entitled ―Top 50 countries by expatriate populations‖ in Appendix II.
88
Remittance volumes show more generalized positive significance across the
country-years in the four-decade time series, in which they are correlated positively with
both legislation and implementation, than in the present decade. For 2000 and 2004, the
selection models show that remittances favor open implementation, while remaining
insignificant to a voting law. The original hypothesis pointed out four indirect
mechanisms as potential causal processes linking remittances to OV laws and open
implementation: first, the national accounts effect of remittances on political elites'
awareness of financial dependency upon the diaspora; second, discursive effects of
remittance-sending migrants upon politicians' awareness leading to symbolic change and
OV legislation; third, remittance incentives for transnational political entrepreneurs to
advance claims and pursue untapped resource streams associated with the diaspora; and
remittances as indicator of diaspora's increasing human and organizational capacities. The
first two mechanisms likely drive the first stage outcome of legislation.
The continuing significance of remittance volumes upon implementation in both
the historic test and the more accurately specified selection model suggests that the third
and fourth effects of remittances as incentive and indicator of diaspora organizational
capacity are taking place. The statistically significant results in relation to both outcomes
in the time-series tests confirm the viability of the hypothesis, suggesting that any and all
of these effects have been taking place in relation to legislation and implementation in the
historic test. The absence of correlation between remittance volumes and OV legislation
in the present decade is somewhat puzzling. The greater global diffusion of OV
legislation to over 70 countries by 2000 and to over 100 today may have sapped the
remittance effects of statistical significance upon OV laws; the model perhaps should add
89
a dummy variable for non-democracy.
While significantly correlated with outcomes in the time series tests, GDP was not
correlated with either stage of reform in the recent decade selection model, indicating that
in the present decade, higher national income has not mattered to overseas voting
reforms. Nor was the post-conflict intervention variable significant for any of the findings
in either test.
Conclusion
The modern history of overseas voting has been marked by five main types of
national contexts: first; belligerent democracies acting to enfranchise masses of citizen
soldiers abroad; second, stable, liberal democracies that have gradually deepened their
institutions to broaden and ensure voting rights for all classes of citizens including those
abroad; third, post-colonial European nations and decolonized states of the third world;
fourth, recent democratizers and labor exporters with emerging labor and commercial
diasporas; fifth, countries experiencing major historic regime change that act to
enfranchise a large population of exiles or emigrants, especially including those pursuing
post-conflict reconciliation under the aegis of multilateral organizations. Three out of the
five historic types—gradual liberalizers, recent democratizers, labor exporters—are
reflected in the generalized experience of recent decades, whereas belligerent
democracies and post-conflict regime change cases have been exceptional.
Driven by individual nation-state projects, the collaboration of leading electoral
authorities links national cases to the normative and institutional structures of the
international system. The global policy network has shaped the international arena and
facilitated the global trend of countries to OV laws and implementation, guiding the
90
analysis of OV as a two-stage process. Amidst the backdrop of global policy
coordination, the OV trend nevertheless moves forward as a set of national processes.
Accordingly, the cross-national analysis in this chapter has identified explanatory factors
from the historical review, testing three hypotheses that result in new findings about the
recent experience of states.
What general statements can be made for the recent period based on these
findings? First, the two factors correlated most closely with both legislation and
implementation have been political openness, positively, and national population,
negatively. Otherwise, the two stages of overseas voting institution-building proceed
according to different political dynamics. In general, in the first stage, smaller, more open
polities with more expatriate citizens have been more probable to pass an OV law, with
remittances an additional positive factor across the recent historical period. Generally, in
the second stage, smaller, more democratically open polities with fewer expatriate
citizens and more remittances have been more likely to realize open implementation. The
recent decade has seen a shift in the arrival of recent democratizers and middle and lower
income nations to the overseas institution-building trend. Higher GDP and greater regime
ages are no longer correlated with voting laws and open implementation, as they have
been in the historical period since 1970. As well, remittance dependency and post-conflict
intervention were not significant as generalized explanatory factors.
The positive finding about remittances is interesting, particularly as the focus
shifts to the qualitative analysis of Mexico and Dominican Republic outcomes. In these
two countries, remittances do not easily translate into political power for migrant actors at
the national level. But as the following chapters will elaborate, remittance flows do exert
91
important push and pull effects in the home country polity. As a matter of material power,
it appears that remittances ―pull‖ politicians to court the diaspora-- rhetorically,
financially, and (less frequently) programmatically through policy change. And as an
indicator of emerging human and organizational capacities in the overseas communities,
massive remittance flows point out the active, capable transnational entrepreneurs
capable of pushing government leaders to open space in the polity to the diaspora,
beginning with double citizenship laws and OV rights. The translation of economic
remittances into political power leads to different outcomes in Mexico and the Dominican
Republic; the findings here focus the case study analysis on particular institutional
characteristics of the domestic polity and the diaspora's collective organization.
There is a puzzling gap in the explanatory leverage of the two models specified,
which appear to capture a much larger extent of variation in overseas voting law
outcomes than in open implementation outcomes. It is consistent with the argument made
initially that open OV will not just be a function of internal politics plus transnational
flows, but rather the result of the interaction between home country politics and
autonomous diaspora organizations and networks that are capable of aggregating
transnational flows. Agent and organizational characteristics omitted from the statistical
analysis were those relating to institutional structure as well as the autonomy of diaspora
citizen groups.
The existence of a professionalized foreign service is the main variable to look at
here, likely to be more important than other additional factors such as education
characteristics, legal (immigration) status, strength of overseas civil society organization
and overseas political parties. Remittances stand as an adequate proxy for all of these.
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Interesting as the various diaspora characteristics may be, it is uncertain that they are of
fundamental importance. Rather, the findings in this study bolster the argument that the
study of political transnationalism needs to begin with domestic institutions and
investigate the dynamics by which they mediate important diaspora forces into the
national political arena.
As immigrant earnings and organization continue to grow, migrant activism
confronts major challenges in the powerful home country structures in place. Not only do
migrants face persistent restrictions against their political participation, but there is also a
large gap between their limited capacities and the organizational requirements for
transnational effectiveness. The larger the diaspora population, and the larger the home
country population, the more difficult the political challenge of realizing open
implementation. Remittances appear to be a necessary prerequisite for overseas citizens
seeking to gain entry into polity from abroad, fetching greater political returns in richer
countries with longer traditions of political competition.
The factors behind the global trend to overseas voting laws, like the global
process of democratization, confront different historical experiences in particular regions
and countries, as existing case study research shows. As the global cross-national analysis
indicates, the factors of political openness, expatriate population size, remittances,
national population and region are all important to OV outcomes in general. It points out
theoretically interesting extension case studies, both among labor export developing
democratizers (India, Philippines, Morocco, Turkey, Ukraine, Indonesia, Algeria, South
Korea, Portugal) as well as stable liberal democracies (U.S., U.K., Italy, France, Spain).
Finally, the chapter points to the mechanisms of the overseas state that the
93
qualitative case studies will focus upon, including the processes of institutional mediation
and the variable of a professional foreign ministry. Ideally, the chapter would have
included an overseas state capacities variable in the quantitative analysis, however, no
scholar or group has yet assembled a quantitative dataset that measures overseas state
capacities in a manner consistent with the dissertation‘s overseas voting theory. The
extension case studies move a step in that direction, compiling a set of data on six
additional cases and identifying standard types of sources and formats for a large-n
collection. The details in the following chapters will give a sense of the merits of
constructing such an overseas state dataset as a priority for future transnational politics
research.
Chapter 3
The Dominican Republic: Exporting the polity
In the summer of 2007 in Santo Domingo, deteriorating state performance reared
its ugly head in ways trivial and profound. President Leonel Fernandez' promise to make
the Dominican capital into a Caribbean version of New York confronted the inevitable
contradictions of such a bold visionary program. Local pundits feasted on evidence of
mismanagement in the photos of underground metro columns lacking structural supports
and perilously close to the streets overhead. The critics liked subways and understood the
political function of public works well enough to laugh. But they saw that New York's
massive gleaming modernity was too demanding for this badly overstressed capital city,
an expensive and dangerous distraction from more basic needs. The commentary grew
more serious, the outrage more convincing, when they contrasted the metro's largesse
with news of a major water crisis and woeful school performance. When the failure of
public water delivery sparked the organization of issue-based protest marches,
commentators identified a major peril for the President's re-election hopes. Would voters
reject the ―President of the diaspora‖35 and his fancy foreign plans in the upcoming 2008
election? Despite the warning signs, no such turn came. Seasonal patterns marked a
resumption of political normalcy: another school year began, the country's creaky,
distorted economy stumbled onward, and the President traveled to New York to don
pinstripes and throw out the first pitch in Yankee Stadium. Unleashing potent streams of
old-fashioned patronage along with his forward-looking ideology, Fernandez went on to
easily win re-election in the first round of the spring elections.
Recent decades' experience of democratization, neoliberalism and opening to the
35 Espinal, Rosario. Presidente de la diáspora? Clave Digital, Santo Domingo, 2 October 2006. Available
online at: http://www.pld.org.do/2006/10/02/b10.htm (20 February 2010).
94
95
U.S. have created many parallels between political life in the Dominican Republic and
Mexico. However, while Mexico's politics have retained a strong national casing,
Dominican politics have been more permeable to external influences. The
transnationalization of Dominican politics has taken root to a far greater extent, as actors
at all levels embrace the diaspora. An active two-way engagement speeds importation of
U.S. and European models occurs alongside an export of Dominican political processes,
practices and mores. No area provides a better example than party politics and elections.
This chapter explains the development of an expansive institution for overseas
voting (OV) in the Dominican Republic. What led to the decisions to adopt and build a
system that not only permits OV, but structures full-scale elections abroad including
campaigning, fundraising and public voting? In contrast to Mexico, the Dominican
Republic is a much smaller nation with a more open economy. But other small-medium
recent democratizers with large diasporas have not adopted OV, as we see in the most
comparable cases in Central America and Southeastern Europe. The macro-factors
obscure specific causal processes at work. Rather than country size, it is the structure of
the Dominican state, with its weak foreign ministry and client-led electoral agency, which
has provided the opening for party entrepreneurs to engage the diaspora in electoral
politics. It has unveiled a new lucrative field for political competition.
My basic argument is that a weakly institutionalized foreign ministry has enabled
strong parties to extend competition and organize elections abroad via the consulates. The
central protagonists have been the politicized consuls, principally in New York but
increasingly dispersed in diaspora cities, whose patronage activities have generated the
interest, legislation and organizational resources necessary for overseas voting. In
96
contrast to Mexico, the absence of hierarchical power structures legitimized upon antiU.S. nationalism removes a crucial obstacle to expansive overseas voting in the
Dominican Republic. The spread of patronage politics abroad has created its own
problems, including the undermining of state policies and a rift between Dominicans who
favor incorporation politics in the U.S. as opposed to overseas elections. However, it also
embeds the political class in the diaspora and distributes material benefits to those
entrepreneurs and allies who are able to deliver long-distance votes.
This chapter is organized in four parts: first, it summarizes the core institutional
outcome and then introduces the reader to the historical context of democratization in the
Dominican Republic; second, it reviews standing explanations for the remarkably vibrant
(and problematic) state of Dominican diaspora politics; third, it analyzes the key
interactions between Dominican political insiders and diaspora actors that led to the
outcome; and fourth, it describes how transnational politics exports the Dominican polity.
I
Democratization and Overseas Politics in the Dominican Republic
In the Dominican Republic, the permissive conjuncture of institutional reform and
revitalized diaspora politics took hold in the 1990s. Specifically, the 1994 Pact for
Democracy established the right to double nationality as one item among a multi-part
political reform that resolved a major electoral crisis (Hartlyn 1998).36 The two steps
required for OV occurred with voting legislation in 1997 and the first implementation in
2004. Promoted by President Fernández, the 1997 overseas voting law passed amongst a
36 Additional features of the 1994 Pact were: two years' Presidential rule by Balaguer with a multi-party
political reform; no Presidential re-election; run-off election rounds in case of less than 50% plurality
for any candidate; separate elections for President and for Congressional and municipal posts, which
would take place every four years at the interim point of the Presidential election; a secret ballot and
voting in closed facilities.
97
broader second wave of electoral reforms.37 Table 3.0 shows the Dominican Republic's
experience along the two-step process for instituting OV in comparison to Mexico.
Following legislation, a series of logistical and political factors forced years of
delay before the upward trajectory of expansive voting took hold. With implementation in
2004, 55,000 overseas Dominicans registered to vote in the Presidential election,
representing 1.6% of the full electorate and resulting in 35,000 votes. 2008 showed the
continuing growth of overseas participation, with 155,000 Dominican expatriate civilians
registering, an amount equal to 2.7% of the electorate (JCE, 2008b), and 77,000 votes
cast. The 195% increase in registrations in one electoral cycle confirms the expansive
nature of the country's formula for instituting overseas voting. Dominican politicians will
likely continue to pay special attention to the diaspora, not only in campaigning but also
in their personnel and policy decisions.
Table 3.0
Instituting Overseas Voting (OV): A Two-step Process
Conjuncture
Legislation
Implementation
Open overseas voting
OV law
DR
2004 ---->
DR
1997
Constitutional
reforms
DR
1994
Restrictive overseas voting
M
2005, 2006 ---->
M
1996
No OV law
No overseas voting
37 Duarte 2003, 5-6. Passed on December 21st, 1997, law 295-97 reformed the Constitution with four
new articles authorizing the right and authority for overseas voting along expansive lines and
designating the Junta Central Electoral (JCE) to determine the means necessary to implement the vote.
98
The emergence of overseas voting has been integrally linked to the broader
processes and historic events of Dominican democratization. The transition from
authoritarianism to democracy in the Dominican Republic occurred gradually over three
decades. In the pivotal decade of the 1960s, a series of defining events marked the
country's emergence from three decades of ruthless dictatorship: the assassination of
Rafael Trujillo in 1961; the popular election of left-wing reform President Juan Bosch in
1962 and his removal by a military coup a year later; the 1965 U.S. invasion intended to
guarantee a friendly government; and the fraudulent election of Joaquin Balaguer in
1966, which set off the first of several waves of U.S.-bound emigration. For the next
three decades, Balaguer was at the center of national politics, ruling as President for 22 of
thirty years. From 1966 to 1978, Balaguer engineered a hybrid regime of authoritarian
polyarchy with neopatrimonial features, in which elections were characterized by uneven
party competition, divided opposition and persistent fraud.38 In 1978, a historic victory by
the main opposition party ushered in more open electoral competition, but once in power,
the left governed ineffectively for two terms before succumbing to economic crisis.
Balaguer returned to win election twice more, occupying the Presidency until 1996,
bequeathing a vast but mixed legacy including patronage politics, paternalism and
Presidential initiative, as well as weak schools, admirable national parks and a three-party
system. Meanwhile, distorted economic development and recurring crises fueled steady
human outflows that would form into a massive emigrant population.39 Table 3.1 below
presents the chronology of overseas voting in relation to this history.
38 Hartlyn 1998. See also Bolívar Díaz, 1996, Trauma Electoral, 2da edición.
39 Itzigsohn (2000, 35) provides an overview of a predatory labor regime, crisis, and restructuring via
labor export.
99
The country's three main political parties are linked to dominant personalities,
while the use of clientelism internally and external outreach have figured prominently in
their strategies. In 1939, Juan Bosch founded the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD)
while in exile in Havana, Cuba. Balaguer built his base off of Trujillo's political
organization to form the conservative Reform Party (PR), which evolved over the ensuing
decades with bases in the Catholic church, the business sector and rural poor. The PRD
was the main opposition party throughout the 1960's, developing a progressive
internationalist doctrine of social democracy and mass organization. But it struggled
under Balaguer's rule, and an internal leadership conflict over opposition strategy led to a
split between Bosch and José Francisco Peña Gómez, who matched mass organization
abilities with ambitious international outreach efforts, to the diaspora but also to foreign
leaders of the mainstream left such as Edward Kennedy and François Mitterand.
Meanwhile, Bosch, who had always frowned upon retail politics and whose radicalism
had been accentuated by the experience of the coup and U.S. intervention, sought a
harder line.
In 1973, Bosch left the PRD to form the Party of the Democratic Liberation
(PLD), which was distinguished by its rigorous attention to doctrine and tutelage of
political leaders. The PLD's scholasticism attracted Leonel Fernández Reyna, an eloquent
young lawyer who had grown up in New York. Fernández would fuse his mentor's
intellectual worldliness with a more optimistic form of liberalism, in which the
possibilities of diaspora were meted out in the material bounty and social progress
attained in the USA. As Bosch's protégé, Fernández would lead the PLD to electoral
victory in 1996 and again in 2004 and 2008, re-founding it as a mass party with a base of
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support among urban middle-class Dominicans and a doctrine emphasizing liberalization,
education, and engagement with the diaspora.
State-diaspora relations during the Balaguer era were marked by distance and an
almost complete lack of contact on both sides, including hostile police treatment of
migrants and a predatory bureaucracy.40 In the midst of economic crisis and burgeoning
emigration, broad domestic opposition to Balaguer's latest electoral manipulations in
1994 led first to crisis and then to a major political agreement that paved the way for a
new national direction. With Peña Gómez leading the PRD and Fernández leading the
PLD, the country's new leadership advanced a slate of constitutional reforms including
double nationality and overseas voting rights.
40 Reformist party sources offered a more benign view of state neglect, contrasting today's consular levies
on diaspora with the more modest, prudent approach to governance in the consulates in the 1970s and
1980s. Balaguer eschewed air travel and international debt, and his clientelism respected territorial
limits. Ironically, Balaguer's contempt for dependency on foreign lenders would give rise to the
country's remittance dependency by the mid-1990s, and the conditions under which transnational
patronage would become a problem.
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Table 3.1
Overseas Voting in Dominican Historical Context
1916 - 1924
1923
U.S. occupation of Dominican Republic
Electoral law establishing Junta Central Electoral
1924 - 1930
Horacio Vasquez elected President in 1924 and 1928
1930 - 1961
Trujillo dictatorship
1939
PRD Dominican Revolutionary Party founded in Cuba by Bosch and other exiles
1961 - 1966
Constitutionalist interregnum & U.S. invasion
1962 - 1963
Juan Bosch elected President and rule until military-led coup forces him into
exile
1963
Joaquin Balaguer assumes Presidency and founds the PR Partido Reformísta
1965
U.S. invades after civil conflict between "constitutionalist" and conservatives
1965-70
Emigration broadens as middle-class professionals leave Santo Domingo
1966 - 1978
Balaguer's hybrid regime of authoritarian polyarchy (Hartlyn)
1966, '70, '74
Balaguer wins Presidential elections over divided PRD
1973
PLD Dominican Liberation Party founded by Bosch who defects from PRD
1978 - present Open electoral competition and alternation
1978 - 1986
PRD rule for two Presidential terms
1984
Economic crisis
1986 - 1996
PR rule under Balaguer for two and a half terms
1994
Disputed election results in national crisis leading to Pact for Democracy
1994
Pact for Democracy‘s Constitutional reforms establish dual nationality and overseas voting rights
1996 - 2000
1997
2000
PLD rule for one term (Leonel Fernández)
Dominican Congress passes law 295-97 guaranteeing overseas citizens right to vote for Pres., VP
election requires overseas Dominicans to return to national territory to vote
2000 - 2004
PRD rule for one term (Hipolyte Mejia)
2001-04 Junta Central sets procedures, establishes Office for the External Vote
2004
55,000 overseas Dominicans register to vote, emitting 35,000 votes in the Presidential election
2007
2008
2004 - 2008
PLD rule (Fernández)
2006
Fernandez founds Presidential Consultative Councils of Dominicans Abroad
JCE approves overseas issuance of electoral IDs, Office for Electoral Registry Abroad (OPREE)
155,000 overseas Dominicans register, emitting 75,000 votes in the Presidential elections
2008
2009
President Fernández (PLD) wins re-election for third term
Constitutional reforms to establish overseas legislative seats supported by President, opposition
102
II
Alternative explanations
What feature of the Dominican Republic or its diaspora has led the country to
adopt such an expansive institution for overseas elections? Existing literature on overseas
voting in the Dominican Republic has been descriptive and country-specific;41 the
slightly broader research on Dominican political transnationalism addresses the question
by implication. Research by Levitt and Doré Cabral, Guarnizo, and Itzigsohn show three
distinct analytical perspectives, respectively suggesting explanations based on external
normative influences, historical-structural factors, and domestic incentive structures.
Each sheds light on certain dynamics of the institution-building process, however none
captures the outcomes in the two cases satisfactorily.
The challenge for each view is to show why party leaders across all parties decide
to vote for the chosen institution and to abide by it. In the Dominican Republic, as in
Mexico, a consensus emerges that finds support of elites independent of party affiliations.
In this regard, norms-based explanations need to show clear evidence that cultural factors
shape actor interests or define the agenda on overseas voting. Furthermore, analytically,
the standard of causal argumentation requires showing that cultural element is prior to
clear material interests of political actors, exerting direct independent effects on the
outcome.
In the Dominican Republic, democracy-rights norms associated with globalization
are present, but it is not clear that they directly affect the treatment of overseas voting.
Existing scholarship has focused upon diaspora agency in directly transmitting new ideas,
practices and behaviors to their kin and community members in their home village.
41 Key early works on the case are Aquino 2000, Duarte 2003, Itzigsohn 2003 and Arias Nuñez 2007.
103
Anticipating political effects, Levitt introduced social remittances as ―the ideas,
behaviors, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending communities,‖
identifying an emerging Dominican diaspora (2001, 14). But Levitt finds little evidence
of political norm change even at a municipal level in her research on political
organization. Similarly, in terms of national institutional outcomes, evidence of direct
diaspora impact upon home country political norms proved to be exceptional, and very
often negative. As the next section shows, my research found that norms flowed in the
opposite direction, namely in the export of domestic political understandings and
practices.
At the national level, norms-based accounts that emphasize the Dominican
diaspora fall short of documenting external impact upon institutional change. For
example, Doré Cabral's explanation for the turn in Dominican state-diaspora relations
leads to a one-sided view of overseas voting (2006). In this strong transnationalist
perspective, the main factors responsible for the changing treatment of the diaspora are
the formation of a transnational social space, social differentiation within the diaspora,
and the vanguard intellectuals who develop an autonomous voice that sharply challenges
the constructs of an exclusive status quo. This is all important. Yet while the analysis
identifies trends and capacities associated with a new diaspora voice, it does not locate
mechanisms linking overseas debates to national politics involving vested domestic
actors who sign off on rulemaking decisions. More basically, this view points to
misleading conclusions about who is steering and defining the outcome in question.
A structural perspective addresses the question in relation to large-scale factors
such as the nation's position in the world political economy, the historical legacies of state
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institutions, and the geopolitics of U.S. hegemony. Comparing the different historical
characteristics of U.S. diplomacy and migratory patterns across the two cases, Guarnizo
concludes that Dominican political transnationalism is bottom-up as a result of the
historical tradition of overseas political opposition (1998, 66). But the distinction
between bottom-up and top-down is misleading, and the historical tradition of overseas
activism is important but not binding. The path-dependence of overseas voting
institutions is limited by the multiple options available for legislators to change the rules
in one direction or another throughout time, and secondly by the dynamic nature of
diaspora society and the ways in which its leaders interact with political elites.
In a more measured application of the structural perspective, Juan José Martínez
of the Dominican Foreign Service outlined the key concerns of state in his contribution to
an early study commissioned by the electoral authority (2000). Grounding the analysis in
the Dominican experience of democratization, he explained the overseas voting item as a
result of historical moment, and he differed with those emphasizing diaspora participation
rights as a leading factor. Martínez predicted a low level of participation due to the
absence of a representative post established for the diaspora. And he highlighted state
concerns in the need for a census of Dominicans abroad, an updated matricula consular,
and an awareness of the prison populations in New York and New Jersey of 7,300
Dominican citizens.
In the most complete account of Dominican overseas citizenship to date, Itzigsohn
utilizes Hartlyn's framework to develop a three-part argument to explain the expansive
implementation of overseas voting (2004a). He cites three processes of democratic
consolidation, remittance dependency and diaspora organization as the most important
105
factors for the extension of political citizenship to migrants. Noting the vicissitudes of
Dominican political history (repression and political emigration, clientelism and fraud),
along with the international economic forces shaping state-diaspora politics (remittance
dependency and transnational social networks), Itzigsohn reviews state-diaspora relations
over different historical periods, describing Trujillo's garrison state (1931-1961),
Balaguer's hegemony (1966-1994), and the role of political emigration in stabilizing the
latter. The analysis then turns to the key action on the ground, documenting Leonel
Fernández' exchange with a Providence Dominican about delays in implementation (270271). Here we see the efflorescence of Dominican diaspora politics.
Appropriately wary of overestimating the extent of diaspora electoral participation
by extrapolation, Itzigsohn points to the important steps in the continuing political
process of diaspora institution-building, and he notes that its continuing expansion will
depend upon upward growth of migration and remittances. Indeed, subsequent events
have confirmed the upward trend-line in electoral institution-building for diaspora
politics, even as remittance growth has dropped sharply and nearly become negative, a
subtle but important fact that points to the autonomy of political processes from social
forces.
My argument builds off of the multi-level framework established in the literature
on the Dominican Republic and deepens the political analysis of state-diaspora relations.
As comparative analysis in chapters two and five establishes, the two contextual factors
of democratic consolidation and economic globalization are respectively necessary and
favorable for open overseas voting. However, in themselves or together, they do not
determine the OV outcome. Indeed, by 1995, a permissive setting for robust transnational
106
politics had developed, but other institutional outcomes were possible. What specifically
led the Dominican case to go in the direction of expansive overseas elections? Here,
causal analysis directs our attention to the interactions of political actors who push for
open implementation and the insider politicians who consistently support them, as
opposed to diaspora organizations or Santo Domingo ruling insiders per se. As I argue, a
specific set of evolving institutional structures and incentives is guiding this transnational
political entrepreneurship. In particular, risk-free opportunities for overseas fundraising
and other clientelistic benefits available in the absence of national controls have spurred
the continuing expansiveness of OV in the Dominican case. Party leaders and migrant
political entrepreneurs embedded in dense cross-border networks have been more
important to the outcome than diaspora group leaders.
III
State-diaspora relations in the Dominican Republic
A diaspora politics framework focuses upon the interactions between state, party
and migrant actors in terms of overseas voting institutional outcomes. In the Dominican
Republic, the politics of OV and the expansive result have been driven less by diaspora
demand than by supply factors in the domestic polity. The following analysis highlights a
divided and poorly organized diaspora, assertive party entrepreneurs, and the permeable,
spineless character of the electoral authority and the foreign ministry's consulates.
Dominican diaspora actors: Overseas Dominicans have played a limited role in
shaping the overseas voting institution due to the diaspora‘s internal contradictions. To
date, overseas residents have developed little in the way of institutionalized capacities
specifically geared to lobby the homeland on concrete political objectives such as
overseas voting rights – for three main reasons. Limited institutional development, the
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particular manner in which Dominican political parties have organized their transnational
structures, and conflict between home-country and resident-country activism have
together undermined the formation of any broadly organized diaspora coalition. The
absence of such a diaspora political voice and arm is somewhat counterintuitive in the
face of the Dominican diaspora‘s uniquely dynamic demographics and political culture.
Estimates of the Dominican overseas citizen population range from 1 to 1.6
million, roughly 10 to 16% of the total national population of 9.9 million in 2005.42
Overseas Dominicans are at once concentrated in the eastern U.S. while also classically
diasporic in their dispersion throughout the Caribbean and Europe. Approximately sixtyfive percent of U.S.-based Dominicans are concentrated in New York City, which is like
Los Angeles for Mexico, as the nation's second largest urban population after the national
capital though declining in relative importance. Between 1997 and 2002, two Dominican
newspapers published in New York covered the OV issue practically on a weekly basis,
but now they no longer circulate, replaced by an online press. Recent demographic
dispersion has created major growth destinations in New England, Miami and Spain, as
Internet technology has enabled Dominican migrants to maintain strong social networks
in the face of diminishing concentrations. The scale of the Dominican diaspora is large
for a country of its small-medium size. Among the consequences of this scale, the
diaspora reflects to a large degree the country's internal diversity, combining major
human talents, marketing opportunities, significant elite and upwardly mobile elements,
and a majority characterized by economically depressed conditions.
42 At the low end, UN data for 2004 point to an estimated global population of expatriate Dominicans of
1.03 million. Hernández and Rivera-Batíz (2003) estimated the total Dominican population in the U.S.
alone to be 1.04 million in 2000, which has been updated to 1.6 million for 2006; Valenzuela and Frias‘
Quisqueya Foundation reports estimated that total Dominican expatriates grew 17% from 2000 to 2005
to reach 1.6 million.
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Analyzed historically, Dominican migration has mainly been more recent than
Mexico's, originating in the 1960s and evolving in waves through the ensuing decades.
Due to Cold War history, the establishment of the first Balaguer government in 1966 and
the withdrawal of U.S. forces involved a migration arrangement that functioned as a
political escape hatch-cum-safety valve (Itzigsohn 2004a, 275). Designed to take pressure
off of the new regime, this arrangement ironically led to a concentration of politically
active regime opponents in New York, residing in the proverbial heart of the imperial
beast (Howard 2003, 58-60). In the 1970s, the tradition of opposition to Balaguer
persisted and reflected the split within the opposition left, as the New York PRD group
saw a subset of its ranks defect and establish the overseas arm of Bosch's PLD.
In the first of three internal contradictions, the institutional development of
Dominican diaspora society is mixed; despite an active and highly dynamic space in the
realm of culture, the limited civil society capacities that do exist have had little if any
impact in reforming the country's national institutions. Dominican diaspora organizations
mainly pursue campaigns and services that focus on Dominicans in the countries of
residence, namely the U.S. and Spain.43 According to one transnational expert, not a
single Dominican diaspora organization has played a significant role in institutional
reform processes associated with democratization beginning in the 1990s and
subsequently.44 The only non-partisan organization that exerted a consistent presence
within Dominican politics as an advocate for democratic reforms is the Santo Domingo43 These include the Dominican Studies Institute at City College, Alianza Dominicana in Paterson, NJ,
the Dominican-American National Roundtable (DANR), Grupo de Profesionales Dominicanos de
Washington, DC, in Madrid the VOMADE (Voluntariados de Madres Dominicanas). Business interests
that actively lobby include the National Grocery Market Association, New York taxi businesses, etc.,
as well as home country exporters.
44 Author's interview, Temple University political scientist, expert in Dominican politics, and columnist
for the daily Dominican newspaper Hoy, in Santo Domingo, 13 July 2007.
109
based Participación Ciudadana (PC). While sympathetic to the overseas voting institution
and a source of expertise on the subject, PC has had surprisingly little substantive
collaboration with Dominican diaspora groups. Its director confirmed that the diaspora
civic groups had been a non-factor in the main institutional reform struggles of recent
decades including the overseas vote initiative.45 ―The Dominicans have been good at
running, but not building,‖ according to a veteran Dominican lobbyist involved in U.S.
incorporation efforts.46
Two other polarities further sap the diaspora community of political force with
regard to home country change. The first polarity occurs within Dominican political
parties and refers to the relationship between home country insiders and diaspora
militants. Specifically, the national parties in Santo Domingo have structured and directed
the overseas cells. While these overseas party cells have formed from direct roots in the
local U.S.-based community, their growth has followed and depended upon the direction
of party leaders in Santo Domingo.
The second polarity refers to a broader split within Dominican diaspora society
between advocates of U.S.-oriented incorporation politics and proponents of home
country politics. Regarding home country politics, organization outside of the political
parties remains stunted. Dominican advocates of overseas voting have not established a
shared focal point for collective political action from the diaspora, let alone the capacities
to formulate and strategically deploy a binational lobbying campaign. Rather, the main
parties have provided the key rhetorical and organizational cues for the diaspora voting
agenda, with the state electoral board following in suit. More marginal have been a
45 Author's interview, Executive Director, Participación Ciudadana, Santo Domingo, 6 June 2007.
46 Author's interview, Former Vice President and Executive Director, Dominican American National
Roundtable, by telephone, New York, 21 September 2007.
110
number of single-issue advocates of overseas voting, which are dominated by individual
personalities, lacking in programmatic depth and prone to polemical bids for publicity. 47
In sum, the combination of weakly mobilized civil society focused to some extent on
U.S. incorporation efforts together with strong home country political parties has resulted
in the absence of a non-partisan political organization in the diaspora.
Political parties: Strong home country political parties have provided a readymade institutional site for Dominican diaspora activism. From grass-roots to leadership
levels, all three Dominican parties have devised and implemented outreach campaigns to
mobilize overseas Dominican communities and tap them for political resources, though
the Reformist party does not have the same historical base abroad enjoyed by the PRD
and PLD. All of the parties engage in fundraising abroad, centered in New York. This
activity boomed in the 1980s and 1990s in concert with the growing incomes of diaspora
Dominicans.
The diaspora has strong connections with the country, family connections, real estate . . .
but the most fluid contact is with the politics, above all when there are campaigns. For
the candidates remittances represent an important base of resources. They do fundraising.
The parties have comités de base structured as part of their overseas affiliates, each one,
especially the PLD, also the PRD, that they activate abroad also for internal [primary]
elections as well.48
The widespread move by Dominican politicians to conduct fundraising trips abroad has
been the greatest effect of economic remittances. The size of the flows functions as a
signal to politicians, who seek to raise funds across socioeconomic levels of society. The
awareness of the diaspora's economic importance to the country is nowhere better
47 The Comité de los Dominicanos en el Exterior (CODEX) has taken combative stances; another selfappointed unit is the Foundation for the Defense of the Dominican in the Exterior (Rossi 2001,
Dominguez 2001). Home country interviewees made no mention of these groups or their heads, in
contrast to Mexico‘s insiders who grudgingly conceded some influence to the diaspora Coalición.
48 Author's interview (translation), Research Director and Professor of Education and Public Policy,
INTEC, Santo Domingo, 23 May 2007.
111
reflected than in the thinking of President Fernández and his political advisors, one of
whom explained it as follows:
Think of it this way: they are only sending 8% of their checks in remittances . . . Now
what does this say about their total income? Dominicans abroad are sending $3 billion in
remittances, this means that their total income is greater than the national GDP of the
entire country here. President Fernandez is someone who is thinking about that fact. 49
Analyzed from this view, the total income of Dominicans in the U.S. is about $30 billion,
an amount greater than the national GDP of $28 billion.
Campaign finance in the Dominican Republic is a massive but loosely regulated
affair. A 1997 law has led to a bloated campaign finance system, adding large-scale
public funding to uncontrolled private fundraising and rampant use of official resources.
Lack of transparency makes it difficult to evaluate estimates of the scale of overseas
fundraising.50 More importantly, the absence of state control opens the window to the
diaspora resource, and political competition plus clientelism disposes politicians to
pursue the abundant dollar streams.
Independent of its economic magnitude, political fundraising targeting diaspora
donors has had two key non-economic effects: first, it spurred politicians to propose
expansive overseas voting; and secondly, it prompted party leaders to commit to the fullscale organization of overseas party affiliates. Years of overseas fundraising and promises
undelivered had disappointed diaspora Dominicans; they were ―giving but not receiving.‖
The disenchantment spurred the PRD under Peña Gómez to present a double nationality
49 Author's interview (translation), Research Director and Advisor to the President's Consultative
Councils for the Dominican Diapora, Fundacion Global, Santo Domingo, 25 May 2007.
50 Confirming the levels of budgetary funding and government spending is also very difficult. One news
report in Hoy (1/22/08 online) reported that government spending on campaign finance was set in the
2008 national budget at $RD 1 billion ($31 million US) to be distributed by the Junta Central to all of
the parties; the report also estimated that all of the parties together would privately raise and spend an
additional $RD 2 billion ($67 million US). However, as a total estimate for all spending in an election
year, the combined amount of $100 million US seems low, at less than a quarter of one percent of the
estimated Dominican GDP in 2007.
112
amendment as part of a project to include the diaspora in the country's decision-making.51
Double nationality soon led to discussion of double citizenship, and the PLD's Leonel
Fernández delivered on his 1996 campaign promise when he signed an OV bill into law
in the first year of his first Presidential term.
Dominican parties approved the overseas voting law without objection in 1997,
―since all of the parties were already conducting overseas campaigns in the first place,‖ in
the words of one municipal party chairman who happened to be particularly perceptive
and informed about diaspora militancy.52 The law was not controversial since it ratified
existing practices, and it enjoyed broad support among Dominican elites because it
identified the desirable population of overseas Dominicans as a legitimate field for
growth. The law's passage has further tightened two overlapping sets of links: the broad
links that embed political parties within diaspora society, along with more specific links
within parties between home country and overseas actors.
Dominican parties are distinctive for the way that transnational entrepreneurship
is fueled by clientelism and occurs at all levels of the hierarchy. At lower levels, partisan
activities involve working class emigrants before and after they emigrate. In the mediumsized central city of La Vega, such emigrants are more likely to be from parties outside of
the local government:
Of those who migrate from La Vega for destinations abroad . . . the large part are those
motivated by economic need, by the lack of opportunities here -- the middle class and
below, not licenciados. In terms of their party preference, these individuals tend to be
from parties of the opposition, since those who are with the governing party have a
chance to get a job with the government. 53
Thus, a working class profile characterized the background and migration
51 Author's interview, General Secretary, Dominican Revolutionary Party, Santo Domingo, 24 July 2007.
52 Author's interview (translation), Secretary General & Campaign Director, La Vega PRD Municipal
Committee, 30 July 2007.
53 Author's interview, Local political director, La Vega, PRD, La Vega, 30 July 2007.
113
experience of the Auxiliary Consul of Boston, who explained how his turn to diaspora
politics followed as a result of his attending the University of Massachusetts. One of
thirteen children, he emigrated to Boston seeking better opportunities in the early 1980s
(when the country's first PRD government grappled ineffectively with economic crisis),
and he worked in light manufacturing before rededicating himself to his education in his
late twenties. He was not especially politically active at the time of emigration, nor for
the first decade of life in the U.S. Rather, as he explained, it was through partisan
networks in the diaspora that he became activated.
I had a sympathy for the PLD at that time as the party of order. But I was not a militant.
When I entered University of Massachusetts, I found there were already three strong
organizations on campus of each of the main parties, and the PLD was the strongest. In
2002, I entered the PLD as a full-time member at UMass. We were very active, with
debates, building links to New York City . . . In 2004, I graduated, and since then, I have
stayed active in the New England division of the party. (translation)54
And in 2006, his exemplary discipline to self-improvement and to the service to the party
was rewarded with a patronage position in the Boston consulate. This individual's story
reflects a broader trend in which economic migration leads to overseas political activities
for many working and middle class Dominican emigrants.
Top party insiders in the Dominican Republic spurred overseas party growth in
the 1990s by designating the structure and participating themselves in the diaspora
organization. With younger entrepreneurs in the diaspora available to provide muscle and
local knowledge, elites and middle managers in the home country have kept abreast of
demographic dispersion and upwardly mobile segments of the diaspora to create new
cells. Close transnational networks and dense two-way exchange enable the sending
home of individual profits, whether to the accounts of one's party or family sponsor.
54 Author's interview, Auxiliary Consul and PLD activist in the New England affiliate of the party,
Consulate of the Dominican Republic, Boston, 17 May 2007.
114
Overseas Dominicans stay informed about home country politics using the Internet and
frequent two-way travel, and they are very price-conscious, for example, shifting their
remittance payments home from dollars to goods in kind when the Dominican peso
recently strengthened against the U.S. currency.55 Motivating actors across levels is the
prospect of a lucrative slot in the consulate: for the party boss, a position as Consul in a
secondary city, perhaps; for the younger hand, a deputy or auxiliary consul position in
which the salary is twice the amount offered in the private sector with half the work. The
growth of the PLD and the PRD in the eastern U.S. is an example of this dynamism, with
each expanding out from New York to create new organizations in New England, New
Jersey and Florida.
With the goal of overseas elections set, party organization exported Dominican
politics to the diaspora, providing financial incentives to diaspora political entrepreneurs
to stir up participation. One example of the inventive clientelistic practices that this has
generated is transatlantic vote-buying. Vote-buying, a common practice in Dominican
politics, refers to the handing out to voters of cash or minor material goods by political
parties in exchange for the recipient's vote (Gonzalez-Acosta 2008). In 2000, with
Dominican parties organized abroad and overseas elections anticipated but not yet
authorized, and a close Presidential race, the price of a transatlantic vote was inflated to a
flight reservation and discounted fare. PLD and PRD entrepreneurs raised funds abroad
to cover travel costs and arranged special charter flights to transport overseas Dominicans
home to vote in the election; tens of thousands of voters arrived from New York and other
diaspora cities to Santo Domingo's Aeropuerto de las Americas, making a vivid splash for
55 Author's interview, Secretary General & Campaign Director, La Vega PRD Municipal Committee, 30
July 2007.
115
campaign organizers and journalists.56 Again in 2002, in a national election without
overseas voting, party entrepreneurs organized mass airline travel to Santo Domingo for
the election.57
Since the OV law's first implementation in 2004, inter-party strife over voting
rules has not slowed the steady expansion of overseas party activity. Dominican parties
have continued to take their campaigns to the voters abroad. Table 3.2 shows a pair of
vivid images from the most recent Presidential campaign. Electoral participation in the
diaspora has clearly resulted in colorful politics, but it has also resulted in the problematic
expansion of overseas patronage and corruption. As we will see, clientelistic practices
have continued unabated in the governments of Mejía (2000-2004) and Fernández II
(2004-2008).
56 Tejada, Diógenes. 2000. Miles de 'ausentes' llegan para votar el 16. Hoy, Santo Domingo, 9 May, p. 9.
57 Sierra, Alduey. 2002. Miles viajan a votar a RD. Ultima Hora, New York, 14 May.
116
Table 3.2
Pitching for Diaspora Support
LEFT: Flanked by diaspora PR organizers of Dominican Night in Miami, opposition
candidate Miguel Vargas Maldonado (PRD) throws out the ceremonial first pitch of the
New York Mets-Florida Marlins baseball game, Sep. 21, 2007. © DiarioDigital RD,
Multimedia.
RIGHT: Showing who's the boss in the diaspora, the pinstripe-clad President Fernández
performs similar honors before receiving an ovation from a roaring crowd of 40,000 at
New York's Yankee Stadium, Sep. 23, 2007. © Hoy Digital, Santo Domingo.
State actors: The third and last set of relevant actors for investigation in the OV
institution building process is that of key government units, namely the Dominican
electoral authority and foreign ministry. The absence of an institutionalized foreign
ministry and a fully autonomous electoral agency permits Dominican party actors to
engage in unfettered overseas politicking. Recent efforts to strengthen the institutional
bases of these two units have resulted in little change. Instead, evidence of transnational
patronage centered at the consulates abounds, even as it serves the latter object of
117
supporting overseas participation.
Central Electoral Board (JCE): Originally formed under U.S. occupation in
1923, the Junta Central Electoral reflects the national evolution from dictatorship to
pluralistic authoritarianism to competitive clientelism.58 The Junta has served less as
leading institution than as an arena for conflict between political forces, weakening its
effectiveness as a result. Its internal divisions are evident in recurring budget disputes, in
its mixed record at implementing electoral law, and in its own organizational structure,
which pits one chamber of appointed judges responsible for administration alongside a
second chamber tasked with legal review and dispute resolution roles. The recent
introduction of new technologies has nevertheless made voting more accessible and
secure for the public in the territory and externally, including revamped high-security
IDs, digital scanner machines, and extensive training.
In 1998, the Junta appointed Dr. Luis Arias, a respected international lawyer, to
oversee a study and planning along with five other experts. The commission was charged
with conducting a detailed analysis of overseas voting in all aspects and creating a census
of Dominican expatriates (López 1998). A year later, Arias announced to New York
Dominicans that OV would not be ready for the 2000 election, but he indicated the JCE's
intention to set up a full-scale system for registration and issuance of credentials directly
to Dominicans abroad.59
For the 2004 implementation of overseas voting, divisions between the PRD
58 Recent internal audits of the JCE database have found that records from the Balaguer era remain
incomplete while the quality of its data since 1994 is much improved. Author's interview, Political
scientist and investigator, Directorate of Investigation and Analysis, Executive Office of the
Presidency, Santo Domingo, 10 July 2007.
59 Vinuales, David. 1999. Las elecciones del 2002, la nueva meta del voto en el exterior. Listín Diario, 11
June.
118
government and its opponents played out within the Junta, leading to a weak
implementation of the electoral law. During this period, the PRD enjoyed an
overwhelming control of the Congress in addition to the Presidency, leading it to appoint
a PRD-leaning slate of trustees for the board. The profile of the PRD appointees together
with their close collaboration with Junta personnel in the consulates discredited the JCE
leadership, setting up ongoing rounds of confusion as the months passed leading up to the
2004 elections (Duarte 2003, 16). The JCE established offices in the different cities but
was unable to issue credentials abroad. Forced to extend the enrollment deadline for
overseas voters, it reported 55,000 inscriptions among overseas Dominicans, a total equal
to 1.6% of the overall national registry and a number that disappointed Dominican
observers.
Even amidst the political stalemate of the first period of implementation, the
expansive format of the JCE's implementation was evident in the continuity of the
registry: when a voter registers abroad, not only does the JCE drop her name from the
domestic padrón, but her name remains on the overseas registry permanently unless she
informs the JCE that it should be dropped or moved back to national territory. The
permanent character of the Dominican OV institution, along with its relative accessibility,
makes it distinct from that of most other nations, which require voters to re-inscribe on a
regular basis generally. Also in 2002, Arias was promoted to President of the JCE, a
selection showing the importance of OV in the Dominican Republic: that it would be not
only a good career spot, but that the Dominican leadership would task its design and
rollout to their strongest leader and future board chairman Arias.
Within an institutional context that is highly politicized and nontransparent, the
119
JCE has nevertheless managed to take a concerted set of steps to implement overseas
voting on a fuller scale for the 2008 election. In 2007, the JCE posted civilian personnel
to main diaspora cities to conduct registration and issuance of electoral identification,
with one staff person per city and often using satellite offices and mobile operations including Boston, New York, Paterson (NJ), Miami, San Juan, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome
and Paris among 21 cities in all.60
For the Junta and its job of administering the overseas voting, the cost difficulties
and diaspora demands of early years have given way to expensive activities in recent
years. Estimates of total annual spending on OV have ranged from $10 million US to $40
million. Clearly, overseas elections enable a bureaucratic form of clientelism,
empowering the JCE President to appoint personnel and dispense resources for the many
overseas offices. Voices claiming that expensive foreign postings and junkets come at the
expense of citizen needs at home have been few to date, though they are increasing
(Espinal 2006b, Alfonseca 2008). More basically, all of the parties support this activity.
For the 2008 election, more sustained promotion efforts resulted in the registration
of 155,000 overseas voters, an amount equal to 2.7% of total registered voters. The JCE
even cried victory at the registration target reached in a statement that invites scrutiny:
The number of overseas Dominicans who registered in the electoral padrón, rising to
153,584 voters, will oblige the candidates of the parties to direct their campaign toward
this population, particularly since the majority of presidential elections held in the
country have been decided by a difference of less than 100,000 votes. 61
It is possible that the registration figures announced have been distorted upward, since the
60 Additional offices included Saint Martin, Philadelphia, Panamá, Zurich, Curacao, Washington,
Amsterdam, Aruba, Caracas, Tampa, Orlando and Virginia. The Boston unit of the JCE ran a field
operation that conducted outreach regularly on weekend days throughout summer and fall 2007 in
Providence, Central Falls, Hartford, Worcester, Lawrence, Lynn, and Revere, among other towns with
Dominican communities in New England.
61 Author's translation of notice obtained from official government website, JCE Voto Dominicano en el
Exterior, 26 February 2008.
120
Junta has an incentive to post a high number. No one has said so, but the mechanisms for
independent observations of overseas voting are limited. As well, JCE professionalism is
improving but still spotty, and the organization's leadership remains weak.62
On election day 2008, the JCE counted 76,000 overseas votes for a participation
rate of 49% of those registered. Various factors that may have been involved in the
considerable drop in participation rate include the solid lead of the incumbent Fernández
in pre-election polls, the timing of the election on a Friday, and perhaps even the rainy
weather in New York City. Nevertheless, the lower than expected participation does not
allay suspicions that the JCE may have inflated its count of registered voters or utilized
generous standards in hopes of hitting a predetermined registration target.
Foreign Ministry: The absence of an institutionalized foreign service in the
Dominican Republic means that the Foreign Ministry is weak in relation to political
parties, which undermines long-term policy formulation and enables the politicization of
consular appointments. The Cold War's end has reduced the Dominican Republic's power
in relation to the U.S. and removed much of the diplomatic leverage of the Dominican
President and his Ambassador in Washington. The recent shift has exposed a divide
between a policy-minded embassy, itself undermanned and scrambling to adapt to a new
diplomatic environment, and a fluid, growing set of independent consulates oriented to
diaspora politics and local communities. This results in the absence of a coordinated
policy of state, a poor quality of consular services, and low-grade corruption. As the PRD
62 As one country expert observed, ―the institutional culture in the Dominican Republic is to be very
good with the normativity, but when it comes to the implementation, the execution often comes up
short of the mark.‖ Author's telephone interview, Former World Bank Senior Country Officer for the
Dominican Republic (2000-2005), present World Bank Director, DR and Haiti unit, by telephone
(Providence-Washington, DC), 8 May 2007.
121
party chief explained, ―a policy of state to include the diaspora is missing.‖63 Both parties
advocate legislation to professionalize the foreign service, and the Fernández
administration has plans for a diplomatic academy. But the condition stands.
One PLD Deputy on the Committee for Overseas Dominicans cited numerous
complaints about inadequate, expensive consular services made to her by overseas
Dominicans during her recent trip to Barcelona and Madrid. She identified the need for
legislative reform:
The consulates are very politicized, they are not working for the community or for the
Dominican foreign representation. The reform that is needed ... it cannot be discretionary,
on the part of the Presidency and the Foreign Ministry, which devolves the question
always to the Consulates. Rather we have to make a reform by Congressional law, with
our action in the Congress. (translation)64
However, continuing clientelistic practices make reform initiatives dubious. One
disappointment is the stalled effort of President Fernández to form consultative
committees in the diaspora cities. The aim was to create an enduring government policy
by instituting Presidential councils that would enable diaspora participation through
investment, teaching, and collective organization. The intention was good, according to
one analyst, but its implementation required consular capacities that do not exist:
The idea of creating a policy of state required a serious study of the overseas Dominican
population. To realize this idea, it was agreed that the consulates would be those to put it
in motion . . . which led to problems, because it required a more systematic coordination
than the individual consulates were able to realize.65
A major part of the politicization of the consulates is the effective independence
of consular chiefs in diaspora cities from the Minister of Foreign Relations and the
Ambassador, particularly in matters of budget. The traditional hierarchy in which orders
come to the consul from the national capital via the embassy does not hold. In addition to
63 Author's interview, General Secretary, Dominican Revolutionary Party, Santo Domingo, 24 July 2007.
64 Author's interview, Congresswoman (Deputy), PLD-Santo Domingo, Chamber of Deputies, National
Congress, Santo Domingo, 2 August 2007.
65 Author's interview, Research Director, Professor of Education, INTEC, Santo Domingo, 23 May 2007.
122
the diminished geopolitical leverage of the top Dominican diplomat, a second major postCold War fact sustaining the rise of the consulates is the material shift generated by labor
export and the consequent importance of the diaspora community to domestic politics.
Dominican Consuls serve at the pleasure of the President and his party leadership, and
their importance stems from their ability to harness a dynamic local economic and social
base. Once installed, they control their budget entirely; they are not part of the national
budget. Thus, it is said that the New York consulate generates monthly revenues from
$300,000 to $600,000 on fees for documents and other charges for transporting items
such as autos, children or cadavers, not to mention revenues from commercial patrons. A
large portion of the consulate's net earnings after expenses go not to Dominican
government, but rather to the Consul for distribution to his political sponsors—some for
his President, some for his party, and some for himself (Vega 2002, 324).
A key rule is that one's service to the local party determines one's rank in the
government. The last three governments have appointed the head of the New York branch
of their respective party to be the Consul. One's rank in the local party determines one's
chances of obtaining a consular post, making electoral performance in party primaries
significant. In 2007, the PLD held its first national primary with full-scale participation
in the overseas territory, with 90 voting centers (4% of 2300), with approximately 45,000
overseas party members registered to vote with observation by the federal electoral
authority.66 The consular patronage system generates aspirations among the diaspora for
inclusion in the division of spoils, which spurs participation and also leads to a
generalized push to establish new consulates. A problem is that many of the Dominican
66 Clave Digital. 2007. Primer boletín será a las 10 PM. Santo Domingo, 5 May.
123
consulates are not officially recognized by the U.S., which limits official access and
privileges such as diplomatic immunity.67
The consequences of the politicization of the consulates have included breaches
of international law, fraudulent electoral implementation, and onerous charges and fees—
from one government to the next. Recurring scandals under the governments of
Fernández I (1996-2000), Mejia (2000 - 2004), and Fernández II (2004 - 2008) illustrate
the cycle of exposé followed by continuity in clientelistic practices.68 Under Mejia, the
JCE had to close the newly opened Philadelphia consulate after improper meddling in the
electoral registration process was detected.69 In recent years, appointing consuls with
U.S. nationality or residency has become a common practice, due to the strong interest in
votes and other support from the diaspora. Early in 2007, the Dominican Foreign
Minister announced its plans to recall three Consuls in New York, Miami and Puerto Rico
following U.S. petitions citing the Vienna Convention prohibitions on the confirmation of
diplomats who are residents or citizens.70 The Dominican delegation at the U.N. is famed
for its ―no-show jobs,‖ known locally as botellas,71 while the Dominican delegation at the
Vatican has more appointees than any country but Germany.
Another important element in Dominican consular patronage, along with political
parties, is private commerce. Clientelistic politics allows business actors an effective
67 Ibid, 326.
68 Forero, Juan. 2000. Inquiry on Moneymaking at Dominican Consulate. New York Times. 17 October.
69 Moreno, Pilar, 2002. JCE suspende registro de votantes en EEUU. Listín Diario, 20 December. In
2002, JCE head Rafael Morel Cerda announced the suspension of the JCE's recently opened
Philadelphia office and its director. The suspension came in response to allegations by the PRSC that
the Philadelphia consulate had illegally taken over the registration process. Morel Cerda assured the
media that the JCE had caught and corrected 95% of the documents submitted with irregularities
including registrations and birth certificates.
70 Dominican Today. 2007. Dominican Republic to replace U.S. consuls. Santo Domingo, 22 January.
Available online at: http://www.dominicantoday.com/app/article.aspx?id=21707 (20 Feb. 2010).
71 Dominican slang mocks empty state offices and ghost workers that resemble crates of used bottles.
124
means to access transnational markets as well as government favors. It provides mutually
profitable opportunities for party actors and national business leaders. Export promotion
is a function of consulates not only in the diaspora cities but also in capitals of large
market countries, such as Tokyo and Brasilia; in the diaspora cities, the traditional export
promotion opportunities are matched by the ―nostalgia trade‖72 for exporters of national
brand consumer products along with distribution of exclusive licenses on import trades.
As a result, foreign commercial patronage within the context of a weak foreign ministry
can mean additional revenues for consular officials and their party agendas.
International trade thus generates material resources for overseas party-building as
well as the political support of national business leaders and middlemen for diaspora
electoral participation. One face of commercial patronage is export promotion on behalf
of the traditional national champions-- the large-scale private corporations with lucrative
businesses producing Dominican brands of beer and rum for the domestic market that
then grow through export to the overseas population. A second face of the same is the
boost that consular machine-building brings to mid-size transnational business activities
of diaspora entrepreneurs. Typically, these import autos, transmit remittances, develop
real estate and hotels, etc. In particular, automobile imports have offered an especially
profitable area for patronage dealings, generating large rents shared between government,
political appointees and importers.73 In this manner, politically connected merchants pay
for exclusive licenses that allow them to bring cars to the island and charge home-country
residents a heavy premium. Seeking to break down such patronage deals, diaspora
72 The ―nostalgia trade‖ of is part of an industrial complex that Orozco identifies with labor export
economies, including as well remittance transfers, tourism, transport, telecommunications (2005, 330).
73 dr1.com. 2008. Cars are a goldmine (27 February), Santo Domingo, from a report in Hoy. In 2007 the
Tax Department reported collections of RD$1.62 billion (US $50 million) in registration taxes on sales
of 17,882 imported autos. On each vehicle sold, the government collects 17% in registration fees.
125
citizens have lobbied Dominican legislators directly to support a bill that would exempt
one-time personal imports of 4-cylinder vehicles from taxes and fees.74
The phenomenon of consular patronage has not characterized the embassy in
Washington, which follows a diplomatic view in understanding its role as handling the
national interest on the part of the state. Moreover, the divergence reveals a split between
working class Dominicans in diaspora cities and elite Dominicans and professional
Dominican-Americans focusing on reform. The Dominican Ambassador to the U.S.
offered his perspective on the split and his impression of the surprisingly strong staying
power of home country clientelism:
As Dominicans became established here (in the U.S.) and in Europe, Spain, as they get
into good jobs and set up firms, I had the idea that they would become less dependent
upon national politics. I thought there was going to be a change in attitudes. But this
experience has not made a considerable impact of how people see Dominican politics. At
the level of the elite, they are very critical of clientelism, of the culture and degree of
politicization, at the (Dominican-American) Round Table, at the academic level, but the
people at the community . . . when they engage in politics, their expectations continue to
be similar to those associated with the predominant outlook about political participation
in the home country. 75
This contradicts the version of political remittances in which diaspora spurs home
country change; rather, home country culture appears to be colonizing the political arenas
and behavior of diaspora communities. In addition to a silent majority of Dominican
migrants who have tuned out of politics altogether, he identified two active groups, one at
the elite level and the other oriented to home country politics, and then offered an honest
description of the latter:
Of the people who are active in politics .. there is one group of those who live here but
replicate what they are doing back there, party events etc., those militants who actually
control the process. These people are still trapped within that framework of clientelistic
politics. I have devoted a great deal of time to the Dominican community, to New York,
74 Meeting of the Commission on Dominicans in the Exterior, Cámara de Diputados 29 July 2007,
Chairman, Dip. Rafael Francisco Vasquez, Santo Domingo, National Congress. From author‘s record.
75 Author's interview, by telephone, Ambassador of the Dominican Republic to the United States, Santo
Domingo-Washington, 26 July 2007.
126
to Boston, to Lawrence, to Miami. I found nice people doing wonderful things but in
general I see .. the same thing .. I was hoping that there would be a change ... beyond the
―Grandma, vote for Hipolyte‖ pattern.76
IV
Instituting diaspora voting: Exporting the Dominican polity
For labor export nations confronting the issue of diaspora enfranchisement, the
type of overseas state structures is a crucial factor in the particular institutional outcome.
Economic remittances and political competitiveness are necessary but not sufficient for
open voting institutions, which depend upon how they are mediated by a structural
characteristic of the national regime, namely the bureaucratic strength and ideology of the
foreign ministry and the electoral commission. How does this work out? Concretely, the
consulates are vital centers of overseas politics in the diaspora cities, and the preferences,
institutional incentives and power relations of those who staff them affect the formation
of political institutions, both locally and in the home arena. In order to hold overseas
elections, the foreign ministry and the electoral commission coordinate a policy to
designate an area and/or locate staff in the consulates. In Mexico, with its professional
foreign service made up of government-appointed career officers and assistants, the
consular staff was neither professionally equipped nor interested in registering Mexican
emigrants to vote. Together with a risk-averse electoral body, this restricted the election.
In the Dominican Republic, in contrast to Mexico, the absence of a professional
foreign ministry opens the organs of state to prevailing non-state actors, enabling parties
and their emigrant agents to develop clientelistic relationships with leading segments of
diaspora society. A clientelistic relationship is based on fees for service. The parties and
the President appoint the consuls based on political service. The consulship is lucrative
due to the guaranteed revenues from fees charged to the local community and the
76 Ibid.
127
prospect of additional earnings from entrepreneurship as the central figure of a vibrant
hub. The consul sets the level of the fees and the budget for each consulate, not the
Foreign Ministry in Santo Domingo.77 Political service rendered includes past and future
political support of the President and his party, through campaign activities, local partybuilding, and monitoring of election administration.
For overseas voting, the result of transnational clientelism is that Dominican
consuls thus face multiple incentives to support expansive voting rules. Overseas
elections allow them to actively tap into remittance-sending communities in diaspora
society and integrate the consulates into cross-border patronage networks.
The growth of transnational patronage machines can be seen in the frequent
opening and closing of offices in secondary cities as a function of the electoral calendar.
When the JCE dispatches an electoral commission staff to a non-core city for a one-year
appointment, an honorary consul is appointed or an entire new consular office is opened
to coordinate and support. Openings and closings in cities such as Philadelphia, Montreal,
Miami, Caracas, and Milan are related to allegations of petty electoral fraud.
Recent steps to establish diaspora representation in the Congress confirm the
persistence of transnational patronage networks in Dominican politics. In 2008, following
the Presidential election, the electoral commission forwarded recommendations to the
Congress to set aside two Senate seats out of 34 and seven seats in the Chamber of
Deputies out of 200.78 In May of 2009, President Fernández and opposition leader Vargás
agreed to a framework for Constitutional reforms including the JCE plank related to
77 Author‘s interview, former Dominican Ambassador to the U.S., Santo Domingo, 27 July 2007.
78 Letter from JCE President Roberto Rosario to Senate leaders, ―Comisión Especial Bicameral
encargada del estudio del Proyecto de Ley de Reforma Constitucional‖ 16 October 2008, Junta Central
Electoral.
128
overseas deputies, which analysts expect to pass based on national consensus.79
Table 3.3 summarizes the key differences between two different types of state
structure and the ways that they impact overseas voting institutions. Appendix III
presents a graphic sketch of the consular patronage network, identifying a number of the
sorts of cross-border clientelistic relationships that Dominicans from all segments and
persuasions described as routine in interviews.
Table 3.3
State structure beyond the territory
Strong foreign ministry
(Mexico)
Consular patronage
(Dominican Republic)
Main actors
Institutionalized state
Political parties, private interests
Consular personnel
Foreign policy elite
Career diplomatic officers
State bureaucratic liaisons
Political appointees
Transnational party entrepreneurs
Local party leaders
Formal objective
Represent state and serve overseas nationals
Informal
responsibilities
Avoid negative publicity
Promote state programs
Support state foreign policy
Political reporting for ministry
Raise revenues from services
Monitor electoral organization
Grow local party, raise funds
Aid party's re-election at home
Accountability
Foreign Ministry
Executive, legislative leaders
President (head of party)
National parties and local cells
Local diaspora elite
Budget flows
Consular budget and fees for
services set in national capital
Consular revenues outside of state
budget control; Consuls set fees.
Overseas voting
response
Oppose diaspora voting, highlight Encourage open voting,
its risks, and
pursue patronage opportunities,
obstruct voter outreach.
organize overseas party building.
OV rules outcome
Prohibitive or restrictive
Expansive
79 Clave Digital. 2009. Pacto retoma prohibición de reelección de 1994. 14 May. Available online at:
http://www.clavedigital.com/App_Pages/Portada/Titulares.aspx?id_Articulo=18176 (20 Feb. 2010).
129
The concept of the consular patronage network identifies material and social bases
that help explain the special vibrancy and persistence of Dominican transnational politics.
The phenomenon is not without controversy within the broader Dominican and
Dominican-American societies. Issues and fault lines have emerged related to foreign
policy and immigration incorporation politics. One divergence has emerged between
immigrant groups focused on immigration law in the U.S. and emigrants focused upon
home country politics. Two brands of reform-oriented politics run against long-distance
participation in home country politics, First, from a foreign policy perspective, the
Dominican Ambassador to the U.S. pointed to the concerns of state that would benefit the
diaspora communities, including more attention to health problems, crime, and the need
for ongoing organization.80 Secondly, within the diaspora society, a forceful political
center is emerging around the efforts of Dominican-Americans to pursue incorporation
within the U.S. polity. Incorporation efforts have required a hard-edged focus to separate
organization-building from home-country politics, according to one founding activist:
If you put together five Dominicans, they start talking about the DR, not talking about
the US . . . We are not talking with Dominican organizations, we are talking about
empowerment of the Dominicans in the U.S . . . Yeah, we were fundamentalists about
that. If you start talking about ―Reformísta, PRD,‖ we are not interested in that. If you
have ties to PRD, we don't want that person on the board. 81
This perspective reflects the struggles of a successful movement to build up DominicanAmerican political organization for representation within the U.S. system, from local to
national levels. Centered in the Dominican-American National Roundtable (DANR) and
in state and local power bases of Dominican-American legislators in New York, New
Jersey, Providence and Miami, this movement has had success in recent years in raising
80 Author's interview, former Dominican Ambassador to the U.S, Santo Domingo, 27 July 2007.
81 Author's interview, former Vice President and Executive Director, Dominican American National
Roundtable, 21 September 2007, via telephone, New York city.
130
the profile of the Dominican community within Latino politics. Interestingly, it has had to
run against the current of Dominican overseas politics and the consular patronage
activities tied to Santo Domingo's electoral cycle. With the exception of isolated and
intermittent support in the Dominican embassy in Washington DC, rights-based
incorporation politics for Dominicans within the U.S. has had to tack away from and
actively disparage engagement in Dominican national politics.
Liberal transnationalism assumes a heightened version of civic liberalism, leaving
out the politics by which national structures and identities direct participation. In fact,
there are zero-sum dynamics at work in overseas voting, as in the opposition to Mexican
overseas voting by the U.S.-based Hispanic organizations. Dual political citizenship
(voting) has been practiced by very few of the general electorate of diaspora citizens in
Mexico and the Dominican Republic. One Mexican Deputy with a close understanding of
emigrant politics in fact lamented the failure of open OV because he believed that the
future citizenship of overseas emigrants would depend upon which state first recognized
their rights—if not Mexico, then it would be the U.S. While liberal transnationalists have
identified a relationship between the struggles for rights in resident country and home
country, analysts should not expect that the two processes support or reinforce one
another automatically or in equal proportion. Rather, it is an area requiring more research,
with a number of two-way linkages that may be complementary, neutral and zero-sum.
The undefined middle space between embeddedness and exclusion presents a core
policy dilemma of state-diaspora relations; there is not yet a clear pathway for states and
overseas citizens to proceed along in reconciling the twin poles. What would the
characteristics of embedded autonomy look like in state-diaspora relations? If
131
extraterritorial polities are to become viable beyond a generation, they are likely to
feature accessible avenues for emigrant participation as well as long-term
institutionalized policies of state. With participation rights and an institutionalized state
commitment, a two-way flow of remittances between diaspora citizens and the home
country will make for a deeper extraterritorial polity. In this regard, a crucially important
area for future practice and institution-building is the twin agenda of migrant rights in
home and residence countries. An important puzzle for state-diaspora policy
entrepreneurs to resolve is the divergence between home and resident country
incorporation struggles. While the foregoing analysis has pointed out the zero-sum
dynamics, there are also potential complementarities and precedents for cooperation in
both cases.
In a small step away from exploitation of diaspora donors, the Dominican PRD
leadership recently announced changes in practice so that fundraising stays in the local
area in which it is raised.82 The availability of public financing and the PRD's continuing
position in the opposition aside, the arrival of a new younger generation of leadership
gives the party's new line some credibility as a genuine step toward a more principled
politics. The change in policy is a small step away from the grip of clientelistic ties,
which continue to hold sway over much of the party,83 but the leadership's intentions run
parallel with the reform-oriented DANR group focused on gaining office in the U.S. The
two sets, consistent in principle, have been separated from one another, yet they both
82 Author's interview, Secretary General & Campaign Director, La Vega PRD Municipal Committee, 30
July 2007.
83 For example, the PRD candidate's pitch in Dolphins Stadium allegedly involved a kickback, with
murky financial dealings related to expensive public relations fees for the event. Adames, Tony. 2007.
Miguel Vargas Maldonado lanzará la pelota más cara del mundo. Tony con el Pueblo. Santo Domingo,
21 September. Available online at: http://www.tonyconelpueblo.net.
132
trace roots to the earlier broad vision of Peña Gómez. Addressing New York Dominicans,
Peña Gómez stated clearly that Dominican diaspora politics ought to support activism in
the resident country, and he encouraged a vigorous engagement in U.S. incorporation
politics.84 But his vision of a liberal transnational politics far exceeded the capacities of
his immediate successors in the PRD and their PLD rivals, who would open up a rupture
between the two directions of U.S. incorporation and Dominican clientelism that divides
their leaders today.
An important issue exemplifying the division between diaspora and home country
mentalities is the treatment of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, which illustrates both
the challenge and the potential benefits of transnational liberalism based on civic
participation. The question of Haitian workers' rights in the Dominican Republic has
created a polemical divide between Dominican diaspora critics and its home country
establishment. Having experienced racism in the U.S. and more closely attuned to
international human rights norms, Dominican diaspora citizens have begun to articulate
strong criticism of home country human rights violations against Haitian workers and
their Dominican-born offspring. Diaspora voices emanate not only from the intelligentsia
segment but also from working class emigrants participating in blogs and other public
discussion.85 On the other hand, establishment leaders in the home country defend a
nationalistic doctrine of ius sanguinis on Haitian nationals (Lozano 2007).
The significant divide between diaspora and home country elites on Haitian
nationals was evident in a sharp exchange at a recent gathering of affluent diaspora
84 Peña Gómez, José Francisco. 1992. Dominicanos en NY. July 8th speech on the disturbances in
Manhattan between NY Police Department and Dominican residents. In Peña Gómez 2001, 343-348.
85 Dominican Today. 2007. Dominicans demonstrate against president Fernandez in NYC. 23 September.
Available online at: http://www.dominicantoday.com/app/article.aspx?id=25528 (20 February 2010).
133
members and President Fernández in Washington, DC. First, a prominent diaspora
academic on the panel offered a strong, direct criticism of Dominican policies, pointing
out the absence of consistency on the question of nationality, lamenting the country's
reversion to the international legal convention of ius sanguinis as a strongly nationalistic
argument, and contrasting it with its own expansive double nationality provisions for
Dominicans in the U.S.:
It is a good gesture to provide nationality for those in the diaspora, who fill the national
coffers with hard currency, but it is wrong for those in the Dominican Republic to
maintain the illegality of the Dominican-born sons of Haitian workers.86
Her comment, which also touched on the sense of exploitation by opportunistic
politicians, generated applause among the audience of diaspora Dominicans. The
response of President Fernández, a progressive liberal, showed the extent to which a
nationalistic doctrine pervades Dominican politics on the question. He disregarded the
international legal convention cited and identified nationality as an issue that is treated
differently according to history and national situations,87 then directed his analysis of the
question in terms of the Haitian state, not the individuals whose nationality was in
question:
Nationality is a key theme . . . Now how do we situate this for a small country, in a small
territory, with distinct levels of socioeconomic development from its neighbors that has
been gaining presence and that could reclaim land in the future? (italics added)
Next he immediately proceeded to identify a case of ethnic nationalism renowned for
hatred, conflict and state violence to create a negative analogy:
Obviously this issue remains important, above all when there are historical differences
86 Comments of Rosario Espinal, Panel on Constitutional Reform in the Dominican Republic, Dominican
Week, Center for Strategic & International Studies, Washington, DC, 18 September 2007.
87 President's remarks (author‘s translation from audio transcript), 18 September 2007, Washington, DC:
―Maybe here in the U.S. they cannot always understand the motivation in the Dominican Republic . . .
the US succeeded in developing itself on the basis of promoting immigration. But other countries adopt
a distinct attitude. Germany has never been so generous, Japan is a very closed country . . . so there
exist multiple models and multiple manners to deal with the migration issue.‖
134
present. The case of the Balkans, the Albanians and the Kosovars: the Albanians
established themselves there, reproduced, acquired the nationality and over time
demanded the territory for their own.
The Dominican President clarified that the issue was not about those who had been born
in the Dominican territory and had lived many years, rather, it was about the children of
the millions of undocumented Haitian workers:
But looking to the future, everyone who finds himself illegally in the Dominican territory
and, this, it is a being that is born in Dominican territory of parents who are there
illegally, I think that the Dominican state has the sovereign and legitimate right to
establish who are its nationals. And this cannot be overwritten by worker contracting or
by any challenge from anyone in the world, because the determination of nationality is a
sovereign act of each state, and that determines it. (italics added to indicate speaker's
emphasis)
Remarkable about the response was the extent to which the liberal diaspora-minded
President grounded his position on conventional state nationalism. As if to heighten the
contradiction, the eloquent and lucid legal scholar-President immediately turned to the
issue of transnacionalidad in his next point. He cited the need to pursue legal efforts to
ensure U.S. recognition of dual nationality for U.S.-born children of Dominican
emigrants, in order to avoid the loss of resident country nationality in opting for
continuing links with Dominican territory. The President's selective use of principle was
remarkable, and it demonstrated the absence of any broad, principled vision behind
Dominican diaspora policies very clearly.
Reconciling the tension between Dominican diaspora politics and DominicanAmerican incorporation politics will require more than broad vision alone, however. For
the moment, the consular patronage system has taken root in the center of the diaspora
realm, presenting a major obstacle to reconciliation that may endure for a number of
electoral cycles in the absence of major national crisis. In the present system, the electoral
and clientelistic opportunities provide Dominican party actors with strong instrumental
135
reasons to continue overseas activism. Electorally, the growth rate of overseas
registration suggests the potential for continuing expansion of consular patronage
politics, although the low turnout suggests an absence of broad support as well.
Conclusion
Emphasizing domestic politics and the agency of political actors beyond the
national territory, this chapter has documented the formation of an expansive overseas
voting institution in the Dominican Republic, including the underlying consensus among
the political class rooted in transnational incentive structures as well as continuing
objections to expansive OV on the part of two contrarian segments. From the point of
view of both ordinary overseas citizens and policy-minded elites, consular patronage has
benefited a few at the expense of the broader community while undermining the
development of state capacities for effective diaspora governance over the long term.
What propelled the expansive outcome? In the Dominican case, amidst dense
transnational exchanges and a party-dominated homeland polity, weak capacities in the
overseas state result in the export of clientelism to the diaspora cities and the patronage
hubs that grow up out of the consulates. Dominican political parties contain the key
actors, but overseas state structures critically guide their entrepreneurship. In the absence
of a professional foreign service and given the regulatory weakness of the national
electoral authority, homeland politicians flock fearlessly to the diaspora to raise funds,
and their subsequent party-building efforts encounter very little resistance from state
actors. Moreover, they inhabit the consulates and harness the state offices to expand the
overseas electoral machinery. From economic migrants to rising middle managers to top
party leadership, Dominican transnational political entrepreneurs have tapped into social
136
networks, obtained clientelistic benefits abroad, and used the consular infrastructure in
support of overseas party organization. The pattern has persisted for two decades; its
impact was evident in the 2009 passage of a constitutional reform to establish legislative
seats representing overseas Dominicans in the national Senate and Chamber of Deputies.
Together, the weak state structures and strong political parties have been more
important than diaspora actors in shaping key institutional outcomes, pointing to a major
contrast between the two cases. In Mexico, as the next chapter details, strong diaspora
demand encountered insider elites disinterested in overseas voting, who acted to contain
diaspora political remittances by steering participation away from the electoral channel.
By contrast, Dominican insiders have coveted the diaspora resource, and their proactive
strategies in pursuit of diaspora support have shaped the OV outcome far more than any
activism on the part of overseas Dominicans.
The foregoing analysis not only contributes a more complete account of overseas
voting than existing studies, it also develops a more integral analysis of the diaspora as
change agent thesis. Transnationalist studies lead to one-sided accounts that can too
easily imply a simplistic image of a virtuous progressive vanguard, and they invite the
strong corrections that diaspora means very little. By studying the interaction of overseas
actors, home country insiders and transnational entrepreneurs, we discover the extent of
export of Dominican political ideology into the diaspora, including the wholesale
recreation of clientelistic politics among an active segment of the community, from
institutionalized electoral structures and party organizations to a clientelist mindset and
particular tactics of vote-buying. But this one-way export of norms is not compelling
across the broad population of overseas citizens and nationals. A second forceful demand
137
for incorporation in the resident country has generated a rift in strategic direction and
political mentalities. The conflict between two distinct organizational logics of U.S.
mobilization and long-distance electoral mobilization has cast doubt upon liberal
transnationalist notions of dual citizenship and multiple membership. But the reform
orientation shared by the U.S. incorporation activists and the diaspora critics stands out as
a noteworthy potential base, offering an alternative current to support reform-oriented
critiques of the home country status quo. As the thinking of Peña Gómez suggests, the
challenge for reconciling these two sets of activities is to think about a principled
transnational politics that can also solve problems and deliver the goods.
For the moment, consular patronage including expansive overseas voting holds
steady as the main public institution governing Dominican diaspora politics. It delivers
political goods better than any other, though its range of distribution is limited. However,
both of the two brands of politics at work in the diaspora-- consular patronage and U.S.
incorporation -- are young and dynamic, a product of no more than two decades each.
Meanwhile, the fragile nature of the Dominican state involves many different
vulnerabilities that raise the chances of massive failure or national emergency. Together,
the still formative state of these two emerging brands of politics in the diaspora and the
potential for national crisis at home point to multiple possibilities that could overwhelm
the present balance. With or without a critical juncture, however, the coveting of political
remittances is a distinctive Dominican response likely to continue.
Chapter 4
Mexico: Demobilizing the diaspora vote
On election day, July 2nd, 2006, Mexico conducted its historic first exercise of
long-anticipated overseas voting, in what was a potential opportunity for the diaspora to
tip an evenly matched internal balance. The Presidential election concluded a highly
competitive and polarized campaign between dueling candidates of the conservative, probusiness National Action Party (PAN) and the populist, left-wing Party of the Democratic
Revolution (PRD). That evening, initial counts showed the PAN's Felipe Calderón
leading the PRD's Andres Manuel López Obrador by less than 1 percent of the 42 million
votes cast. Disputes led to partial recounts that further narrowed the margin and set off
two months of post-electoral controversy. In September, the state electoral court ruled to
certify the results in favor of the PAN's Calderón. As Mexico's electoral struggle between
left and right played out, analysts looked with interest to see what role the nation's
diaspora and its millions of recently enfranchised citizens might have played.
In total, only 32,651 out of 11.6 million overseas Mexicans managed to vote in the
Presidential election. At the country's pivotal hour, the diaspora had not registered even a
blip on the electoral radar. The soundless thud of such extremely low participation, equal
to fewer than half of one percent of the country's emigrant population, was echoed a year
later in a desultory replay at the state level, when a mere 349 emigrants from Michoacán
voted in that state's first overseas election out of an estimated diaspora of 2.5 million.88
After decades of debate, mobilization and vast spending on research and design, either
the overseas voting movement had been a farce, or insiders had perfectly engineered
system to guarantee low turnout.
In the election's aftermath, with the national capital in the grip of protests,
88 Avila, Oscar. 2007. Mexico weighs fix after poor turnout. Chicago Tribune. 16 November.
138
139
political attention in Mexico was focused upon the internal dispute, not the diaspora. Yet
two interpretations of the overseas voting outcome emerged, one pointing to disinterest
and one to inaccessibility. First, among Mexico City's political elites, low turnout was
read as confirmation that the diaspora population had little interest in voting from abroad.
Insider eyebrows were raised about the credibility of diaspora activists who had claimed
to speak for millions, and OV expansion and migrant concerns were dropped from the
legislative agenda. On the other hand, critics blamed the low turnout on the
inaccessibility of voting guaranteed by the restrictive format for overseas voting. The
strict guidelines of the 2005 overseas voting law prohibited party organization abroad and
required voters to comply with extremely onerous and costly registration procedures on
an individual basis. In the previous 1994 and 2000 cycles, candidate trips to California
and Chicago had spurred diaspora campaigns. But in 2006, as a result of the encumbering
electoral rules, sterile ―elections without campaigns‖ had replaced the heated ―campaigns
without elections‖ of earlier cycles.89 Thus emigrant activists lamented what they called
―elections of state,‖ namely the formal procedures for confirming elite rule on the basis
of a token ―upper-middle-class vote‖ in the diaspora.90
As with the internal allegations over electoral fraud, there was ample evidence
available to support either of these two conflicting views of elite insiders and government
critics on the subject of Mexico's low overseas voting turnout. Diaspora boasts had been
overstated, just as onerous procedures had legalized overseas voting while at the same
time stamping the life out of it. Whatever one‘s vantage point, indifference and
89 Robert C. Smith, 2007, comments as panel discussant. Latin American Studies Association conference,
7 September, Montreal.
90 U.S.-based Mexican migrant leaders criticized the overseas voting implementation along these lines
while participating in the IME Focus Groups, Foreign Relations Ministry, Mexico City, 4 October
2006.
140
inaccessibility were both clearly at work. Nevertheless, the focus of this chapter is on the
non-participatory format that significantly reduced overseas participation.
The restrictive format that reduced overseas participation in Mexico presents a
major puzzle, since important political and economic factors pointed toward a more
vibrant form of overseas voting. Between 1985 and 2000, the institutionalization of
political competition between three strong parties culminated in transition from one-party
rule to political competition, putting Mexico near the top of the indices for political
openness. Massive emigration flows surged to make Mexico one of two top remittance
receiving countries, sustaining increasingly organized transnational federations and NGO
actors at all levels of domestic politics. Moreover, nearly two decades had passed since
President Salinas de Gortari launched the acercamiento policy in 1990 to institutionalize
diaspora outreach efforts; this policy had resulted in innovative programs and earned
Mexico an international reputation as an innovator in state-diaspora relations including
overseas voting from Santo Domingo to Stockholm. For these reasons, and with its
national income among the world's fifteen most productive industrialized economies,
Mexico appears to have had ample resources to generate both a strong political supply
and demand for overseas voting institutions.
Why did this exemplar of labor export democracy -- the second leading remittance
state in the world, with competitive elections and the largest binational diaspora -- deliver
a closed reform in spite of its rhetorical and policy direction, given the increasing
visibility of its migrant leaders and groups? As my research confirmed, this outcome was
rooted in a consensus among Mexico's elite political actors' in favor of restrictive reform
in Mexico. The larger puzzle is about what led Mexico's leaders across the spectrum to
141
this particular consensus.
The chapter first summarizes the institutional outcome and provides a chronology
of Mexico's overseas voting history; second, it reviews existing explanations; third, it
analyzes state-diaspora relations in the roles of Mexico's migrant actors, party leaders,
state bureaucrats, considering subnational activities; and fourth, it evaluates the
implications of the analysis for the ongoing practice of Mexican transnational politics.
I
Global Nation, Territorial Voting
This chapter focuses on the political contest and the interactions of state, party and
migrant actors that led to an intermediate outcome, neither prohibition nor expansion of
diaspora voting. Existing theories and arguments offer incomplete answers at best,
overlooking the connections between elite domestic politics and migrant activist
networks. The formation of the restrictive consensus sheds new light on the effects of
political openness, remittances and state structure. In the following analysis, gradual but
restrictive reform emerges from an alliance of elite actors across key agencies and all
three parties. With adoption and implementation, I argue, Mexico's capable foreign
ministry provides a second-best substitute for passive political parties, and its strong
controlling electoral bureaucracy diverts diaspora politics from electoral activities into a
set of state-led initiatives, while migrant actors in turn channel political activities through
civic organizations of federations and NGO groups. Conspicuously absent from
transnational scene are the big three political parties.
The key outcomes and turning points of Mexico's overseas voting design fall into
three periods over two decades. The demise of PRI hegemony prompted constitutional
reforms in 1990 and 1994 to accommodate and regulate increasing political pluralism.
142
After a 1994 election crisis, PRI leaders acted deliberately to stem migrant opposition
with a half-step toward legislation. Congress passed a dual nationality amendment; a
constitutional amendment enshrining the right to overseas voting; expansion of the
Program for Communities in the Exterior; and a rhetorical shift to recognize Mexico's
―global nation‖ in the 1995 national plan:
The Mexican nation goes beyond the territory that its borders contain. An essential
element of the Mexican Nation will be to promote constitutional and legal reforms so that
Mexicans preserve their nationality independent of the citizenship or residence that they
have adopted.91
Overseas voting rights emerged on the national agenda in Mexico after the 1994 passage
of double citizenship rights raised the question of long-distance political participation.92
In 1996, constitutional reforms included a clause guaranteeing the right to vote to all
Mexican citizens regardless of location. In 1998, the IFE recognized its technical viability
for Mexico and outlined options and considerations for implementation. But the question
stagnated in the absence of a voting law, with continuing debates about feasibility and
political concerns. Even with the election of Vicente Fox in 2000, the new government
upheld much of the traditional politics of migrant exclusion. Embellished rhetoric did not
match the failure to pass overseas voting legislation in 1999 and again in 2002.
Not until 2005 did Mexico's Congress act to enable voting in Presidential
elections for expatriate citizens, and then in a deliberately restrictive manner. Passed on
the session's last day, the overseas voting law specified a postal ballot, prohibited partisan
activities abroad, and limited eligibility to Mexican voters abroad in possession of IFE
electoral credentials previously obtained within Mexican territory. Also limiting
91 National Development Plan, 1995-2000, translated from original Spanish in Alarcon 2006, 165-6.
92 The citizenship law, formulated in response to California's proposition 187, allowed overseas Mexicans
to apply for a foreign citizenship without giving up their original Mexican citizenship.
143
participation were extensive registration procedures, a costly certified mail requirement
for requesting a ballot ($9), a confusing ballot request form, and a calendar that required
overseas citizens to request the ballot at least six months before the election. Table 4.0
provides a chronological overview.
144
Table 4.0
Chronology of Overseas Voting in relation to major political events in Mexico
1928-´29
Movimiento Vasconcelista challenges conservative nationalist regime from Los Angeles
National Anti-reelection party congress presents ―14 Points‖ platform in Mexico City
1970-1976
Initial Mexican state-diaspora efforts under Echevarria
1988
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas campaign in California, Chicago
1988-1994
Salinas administration creates Program for Mexican Communities Abroad (PCME)
1990
Democratic transition accord: creation of IFE, passage of electoral laws
1991-2005
19 bills introduced to Congress for extension of vote to Mexicans abroad
1994
Mexican Congress passes dual citizenship reform to Mexican constitution
Mexican migrants in U.S. hold mock elections
1994
Zedillo outlines ―Global nation‖ doctrine for 1995-2001 National Development Plan
1996
1998
Constitutional reform eliminating specification of location in citizen´s right to vote
IFE Commission concludes from review that overseas voting is technically feasible
1999-2000
Migrant activists in U.S. organize Vote Mexico 2000 coalition to promote VoE for 2000
2000
Election of Vicente Fox (PAN) alternáncia and acknowledgment of migrants
Migrants hold mock elections in Chicago, Southern California
2002
Institute for Overseas Mexicans (IME) established in Foreign Ministry
2003
PRI gains plurality of Congress, threatening hopes for vote reform
2004-05
Coalición para los Derechos Políticos de los Mexicanos en el Extranjero forms, lobbies
Sep. 2004
OV bill introduced in Congress by Laura Maria Elena Rivera of the PRI
March 2005
Senate testimony of IFE, SRE chiefs raises feasibility doubts among lawmakers
28 June 2005
Passage by full House of overseas voting law, Sixth Book to Mexican electoral law
2005-06
First OV organization: IFE-COVE unit implements elaborate 12-month plan
2006
6 July Presidential election: IFE counts 32,510 expatriate votes among 41,197,322 total
Court confirms Calderón (PAN) victory by 244,000 votes as PRD alleges fraud
145
II
Three views of transnational politics
Studies of overseas voting in Mexico differ in their emphasis upon external
normative influences, historical-structural factors, or domestic incentives. Each view
sheds light on certain dynamics of the process, however, none explains the outcome well:
either it fails to do so on a systematic theoretical basis, or it overlooks one of two
opposing forces at work in Mexico‘s restrictive outcome.
First, norms-based perspectives predict a more open overseas voting institution
than in fact occurred in Mexico. For example, sociological theories of globalization
clearly suggest that Mexican emigrants in the U.S. would adopt dual citizenship marked
by a global logic and simultaneous practice in both countries (Sassen 2006, 295-6; 319321). But instead, double exclusion blocks Mexico‘s migrants from entry in both polities.
Extraterritorial rules form as minor adaptations to national institutions, at a crawling
pace, with major obstacles to dual participation. The zeitgeist of denationalization hailed
by Sassen is not evident in the political realities that shape OV rules.
Similarly, transnationalist theories that highlight ideational contributions made by
remittance-sending emigrants to the home-country polity (Goldring 2002) also suggested
diaspora-led political change. In this view, institutional change would follow from
political consciousness and collective organization formed among diaspora actors as a
result of the experience of migration, both among typical workers and more educated
activists. Indeed, migrant learning is not inconsequential, as one former IFE director
made clear:
How much of what they learn there -- ideas -- has an impact here? Well, it's enough to
look at the most superficial things, if you look at many of the migrants of indigenous
origin, already in the clothing, you notice the change. If you look in the airplanes, there
they are with tenis (sneakers), with jackets, with caps . . it's a change in their clothing, a
result of the fact that they are migrants, that they look at the world and see that their
146
community is not the world and that this world affects their community. Now if this is
happening with clothes, it's also happening with ideas. (translation)93
Goldring's theory took note of powerful material and political forces that had been
brewing in the decades since 1968, when economic growth began to decelerate and
unregulated emigration began to spiral upward. As Mexico's emigrant population
multiplied in size and flourished in its earnings and human talents, burgeoning
transnational communities supported a proliferation of migrant organizations and
federations (Moctezuma 2005). This provided a base for civic and political activism
including a movement for overseas voting access, along with full-time migrant activists
actively pushing the formation of diaspora political consciousness.94
However, the argument for political remittances from the diaspora to Mexico
remains quite difficult to make, for empirical and analytical reasons. Empirically, as
discussed below, research on overseas voting confirmed a large gap between the
mentalities of overseas migrant activists and home country political elites. Analytically,
when evidence includes changes in elite behavior and institutional outcomes, it is difficult
to trace such changes at the national level to political activities of migrant transnational
communities. As a result, migrant influence is usually suggested but not confirmed and
easily exaggerated (Cortina 2006). In fact, the migrant organization framework overlooks
basic institutional weaknesses of the federations and clubs, which not only lack material
basics such as full-time staff, offices and binational presence but also suffer from deeper
governance shortcomings in the absence of rules, transparent procedures, and a stable
sense of comity among the leadership segment.
93 Author's interview, former IFE director. Mexico City. 16 November 2006.
94 Author's interview, Chicago Director, Coalition for Political Rights of Mexicans Abroad, by telephone,
28 September 2006.
147
More broadly, the norms-based perspective offers limited explanatory power by
overestimating the weight of migrant actors at the expense of situated domestic structures
and elites. Ideas do flow across borders more easily than ever, and new actors have
emerged, but to be influential, they need to locate institutional hooks to catch onto,
otherwise actors drop them. For example, migrants easily set aside foreign learning when
it runs against local ways. As one mayor‘s aide explained about the ―broader way of
thinking‖ he had become adapted to while working in New York, ―A lot of times, it
doesn‘t fit, you can‘t use it here‖ (translation).95 One other weakness of the norms-based
perspective as applied in the Mexico diaspora politics has been its overwhelming
attention to transnational migrant communities at the expense of the investigation into the
uses and effects of norms within elite political settings, in particular national level
political leaders.96 Undertheorized is the role of the PRI's territorial nation-state doctrine
upon Mexican political elites and their grudging reluctance to recognize migrant actors.
In contrast, a statist perspective on emigrant politics emphasizes territorial
organization, sovereignty norms, historical precedent, and steep asymmetries of power as
factors that limit diaspora incursions, however this view lacks causal leverage and misses
crucial parts of the outcome. In Mexico, statists describe the structures of political
exclusion, but refrain from analyzing either diaspora actors (Carpizo and Valades 1999)
or causal processes (Calderon and Martinez 2004). A statist analysis recognizes keenly
the ―safety-valve politics‖ of labor export, in which emigration has conveniently served
95 Author's interview with General Secretary for Administration, Mayor's Office, Huaquechula, Puebla.
24 July 2006. A PAN member, he spoke openly about corruption in the Puebla's politics and indicated
that the state's emigrants were not organized politically and that its youth lacked consciousness and
models of responsibility.
96 Thus, recent contributions shed further light on subnational politics and resident country incorporation
struggles. See Smith and Bakker 2007, Bada 2004.
148
local and national leaders by removing sources of opposition and pressure for change.97
This view is most useful as a corrective to overstated claims of migrant agency.98
The state-centric view falls short, however, in explaining variance; more official
ideology than explanatory theory, lacking a causal argument, it takes labor export and
perpetual migrant exclusion as the norm. It neither interrogates the structures and policies
that have brought them about and makes them stay nor considers the conditions under
which they might crumble or change. It ignores the migrant lobby's role in marshaling a
compromise voting law against the entrenched opposition of powerful legislators to a
unanimous vote of approval in the National Congress in 2005. On overseas voting, it also
conflates empirical analysis with an a priori normative objection to the practice that
betrays a state-nationalist ideology, favoring a status quo defined by a hierarchical state
required by threats to sovereignty. The proponents of the state-centric view know much
about Mexico‘s politics, but their view allows little room for institutional change, let
alone the actors and causal mechanisms crucial to affecting whether this happens or not.
State-nationalism is influential in shaping the minds of Mexican political insiders,
who subscribe to a Huntingtonian view of nationalism (2004). Within Mexico, the
perspective pervades the Law School of the National University, which diffuses it across
generations as a coherent perspective on internal as well as external politics. It is
prevalent in the informal discussion of overseas voting by Mexican elites and citizens,
while less frequently explicated in written analyses. Carpizo identifies overseas voting as
at once unfeasible due to logistical requirements as well as dangerous to national security
(1999). As former Secretary of Governance in the 1970s among other major public
97 ―La política de la valvula d‘escape,‖ as described originally by the former Director of Mexico's Federal
Electoral Insitute. Author‘s interview (translation), Mexico City, 16 November 2006.
98 For example, Cortina et al 2005 accurately show the limited extent of collective remittances.
149
executive positions, Carpizo moved to become director of the UNAM Law School's
Center for Juridical Studies, where he and his associates have played an active role in
enunciating the traditional doctrine of territorial organization as a normative construct
and a political ideology. The central principles of state sovereignty, territorial control and
independence from the more powerful U.S. feed into the view that mass overseas voting
is and should be out of the question. The presumption is that emigrants are passive,
soured on politics, lacking capacities to organize and therefore wards of the state. It is
skeptical about any significant political returns from the human talent, political interest
and passion for the home country that exists in the diaspora.
Interest-based accounts of Mexico's transnational politics do a stronger job of
connecting migrant activism to political outcomes. Analysts of Mexico's domestic politics
explain legislative outcomes as a concise function of incentive structures and veto points.
Thus Parra analyzes party interactions related to overseas voting legislation between
1994 and 2003 to show that the absence of a voting law depended upon the politicalelectoral preferences of party elites. A virtue of this approach is that it cuts through
rhetoric and focuses upon the actions of legislators and policymakers on migrant issues
defined in terms of concrete political interests:
The voto en el extranjero system worked because not that many voted. This satisfied the
parties, the system worked as designed.99
But the same rationalist point of view also tends toward an a priori rejection of
extraterritorial institutions and unfounded assertions on the question of potential migrant
influence.
Mexico will never permit campaigning abroad, they'll will never permit spending money
abroad, and we will never see a high voter turnout . . . I actually never thought there
99 Author's interview, Political science department chair, ITAM, Mexico City, 9 October 2006.
150
would be even a partial reform. I had a debate with Wayne Cornelius. He thought there
would be, he was right, it turned out. But the vote was minor and it's very unlikely to be
broadened.
As the interviewee admits, the interest-based view in fact failed to predict the
intermediate outcome in 2006. According to it, there should have been no law in 2005
and no vote in 2006.
One weakness in the rationalist analysis is that its proponents posit elite actor
preferences on overseas voting laws retrospectively, without examining the origin or
potential malleability of these preferences. Furthermore, it concentrates exclusively on
interactions of insiders within the political class, omitting the political dialogue and
contestation in the relationship between political class and diaspora activists, who in fact
played a crucial role in the process. Thus, while it provides a more focused account of
legislator behavior, it does not interrogate the formation of party preferences. Left aside is
the major question of what led the party leaders to change their preferences in 2005, and
where these preferences came from in the first place. The chronological review confirms
that party competition for diaspora favor and resources is minimized for most of the
period, but then competition is activated in 2005 when legislators fear the electoral
consequences of a public vote against overseas voting. What is at work blocking party
competition effects and then activating them in 2005? The domestic politics view leaves
this question unanswered. The analysis needs to take into account the dynamic factor of
Mexico's diaspora activists and the way that they learned to lobby. A more complete
account of elite preferences including their origins occurs when we analyze legislator
actions on overseas voting not as an isolated result of a static, closed system, but as a
result of party leaders' interactions with migrant and state actors.
151
III
State-diaspora relations in Mexico
A diaspora politics framework focuses upon the interactions between state, party
and migrant actors in terms of overseas voting institutional outcomes. Mexico's recent
treatment of overseas voting has occurred amidst increasing political pluralization and
migrant activism in recent decades. By contrast, state and party elites have shown little
inclination to steer diaspora organization in the direction of electoral participation, not
only historically but also in recent decades.
Historically, Mexico‘s laissez-faire approach to emigration fit into a foreign policy
dedicated to non-intervention and a neat internal division of labor. At the heart of the
corporatist bargain was the understanding that the PRI would take care of workers and
their voting inside the territory, while the Ministry of Foreign Relations would manage
the workers abroad. The overseas job excluded voting – the SRE did not have to do that.
Instead, it was committed and organized to defend the rights of Mexican overseas
workers, with a large set of consulates and a body of lawyers trained in international legal
redress. Not unenlightened per se, this paternalistic approach of the SRE fit into a foreign
policy mission aimed at the protection of national sovereignty from the U.S., at the
service of a strong Presidency with a foreign service schooled in western diplomacy.
Since 1990, the acercamiento doctrine has developed a broad range of active
linkages between Mexico's polity and diaspora, with specific policies other than voting.
In 1990 under President Salinas, the SRE launched the PCME program for Mexican
communities abroad creation to open up the gulf between the Mexican government and
the diaspora. Salinas had been shocked by the hostile reception he received from Mexican
workers in a meeting at Stanford University (Calderón and Martínez Saldaña 2002).
152
Over the two decades since 1990, however, The SRE‘s policy initiative has
become a serious force of consequence to overseas voting. The program began with
outreach activities that generated further criticism from the diaspora for being insincere.
It fostered the creation of state-level agencies and coordinate their policy efforts. The
main policy result of the PCME has been the 3-for-1 program to establish matching funds
from national and state governments in support of migrant collective remittance projects
(Goldring 2004). The much-touted 3-for-1 program has not been directly significant for
overseas voting. What is most important is the successor entity of the Institute for
Mexicans in the Exterior (IME), which has organized a national council of overseas
Mexican leaders. The council serves as the only central national grouping of overseas
Mexicans, and as a means of political participation and organization it presents a
substitute for overseas elections.
Mexico's diaspora actors: Mexican diaspora advocates plays a minor but mixed
role in national politics. Mexicans abroad have been able to identify themselves as a
community and to promote their own development, according to Candido Morales.100
However, for Mexico's overseas activists who seek to advocate on behalf of this
community, an inherent problem of diaspora politics emerges in the question of political
legitimacy, since their leadership lacks democratic representativeness or state-endowed
authority, at least as it is conventionally certified in domestic politics and international
relations. Political effectiveness in this condition calls for especially resourceful
strategies.
The Mexican diaspora signifies political potential, however to date a leading
100 Morales is a former labor activist in the western U.S. and present Director of the Institute for Mexicans
in the Exterior. See Morales, p. 9 in González Gutiérrez 2006a.
153
diaspora actor or institution has not congealed into any sort of permanent national force.
The diaspora population doubled to nearly 12 million between 1996 and 2006, even as
the domestic population continued to grow at a steady rate to exceed 100 million. But
organizationally, the hometown groups associated with migrant politics have been a
minor factor in the overseas voting movement, for a number of reasons: the clubs and
federations focus on local and state matters; many are weakly institutionalized and lack
binational presence; an absence of formal or informal rules complicates civic group
involvement in lobbying, elections and party politics; weak leadership perpetuate
personal polemics, etc. As a population of overseas citizens as well as a distinct site for
political remittances,101 the Mexican diaspora possesses raw political capacities in its
individuals, networks, organizations and demographic scale.
In the absence of strong Mexican diaspora organizations (whether state, party or
civic in nature), individual group leaders and networks have provided the thrust behind
the overseas voting movement. As this chapter documents, the transnational lobbying of
the binational activist network exerted a consequential impact on the 2005 voting law.
The movement for migrant political rights began in the late 1980s and reached its greatest
influence in the binational activist network named La Coalición para los Derechos
Políticos de los Mexicanos en el Extranjero. The fraudulent 1988 election and the visits
of opposition candidate Cuauhtémoc Cardenas to Mexican communities in Chicago and
California sparked a resurgence in Mexican expatriate partisan activism; diaspora
opposition was closely linked to the left-wing PRD and also to the conservative
opposition of the PAN that was based in Mexico's northwestern emigration states. But
101 Brubaker argues that diaspora should refer to a stance not a group (2005, 10-13); Ragazzi 2010 updates
and further discusses the conceptual analysis. My view here is agnostic, aware that multiple meanings
and political uses of diaspora are applied in overseas voting politics.
154
initial successes in raising the migrant agenda in the 1990s led to repeated failure to pass
overseas voting legislation in 1999 and 2002. This led activists to revise their political
strategy, shifting from a focus on public demonstrations including mock elections to a
lobbying campaign more carefully targeted at elites involving coordination by Internet
and leverage by media pressure. The network formed across parties in 2003 as a
transnational lobbying campaign of overseas activists, civic leaders, and domestically
based academics and government insiders. Its exclusive focus on overseas voting
legislation differentiated it from apolitical migrant associations and Washington-based
Mexican-American groups hostile to the project.
The binational activist network played a pivotal role in exerting political leverage
to force Congressional passage of the 2005 overseas voting law. Utilizing the Internet
along with direct lobbying, La Coalición mounted an agile and relatively effective
lobbying intervention in 2004-05, which Ayón has called ―the most important, sustained
and successful lobbying effort of the Mexican network to date‖ (2007, 159).The final law,
which was introduced in November 2004 in an expansive format, resulted from delicate
political maneuvering by each of the parties, and it barely survived hostile interventions
by the heads of the electoral commission, the foreign ministry and the PRI's legislative
leadership. With its passage, the voting advocates were able to outflank the PRI bloc in
the House, which sought to put off an open vote, and to hold its members to their public
positions on a matter that they had secretly just wanted to kill.102
La Coalición has been a critical exception to the pattern of diaspora fragmentation
in its ability to break open the autonomy of a national polity thus far closed to migrant
102 Author's interview, Mexico City coordinator, La Coalición para los Derechos Políticos de los
Mexicanos en el Extranjero, Mexico City, 16 October 2006.
155
groups. The 2005 law, restrictive as it was, nevertheless represented a partial success that
put Mexico in the intermediate category of states that have implemented overseas voting
but not done so on a fully open basis. Local and subnational level actors have played a
well-documented role in Mexico's diaspora affairs (Burgess 2005, Bada 2004), though
mainly in the social and economic realms, and they have had little presence or influence
at the national level politics. Distinguishing the activities of the binational network were
three factors: a high degree of consensus on the overseas voting cause among otherwise
divided migrant leaders; organizational independence and a non-partisan profile with a
handful of core activists hailing from all parties and NGOs; and an effective combination
of political tactics and organizational features developed by the network's core
activists.103
The transnational lobbying campaign combined symbolic politics, moral leverage
and accountability politics104 as effective means of pressing their agenda to a vote against
the best efforts of national legislators. Its use of media spanned cyberspace, traditional
print media from La Jornada and regional newspapers in Mexico to the New York Times
and the Los Angeles Times as well as Mexican periodicals in the U.S. like La Opinión in
Los Angeles and MX Fronteras and Nuevo Siglo in Chicago, and also Hispanic television
with regular exposure through Univisión. While Internet and satellite links have been
necessary enablers for long-distance lobbying, the technologies hardly guarantee
effectiveness. La Coalición deployed these capacities more actively and effectively than
other Mexican diaspora actors (see Exhibit, p. 157).
Importantly, the 2005 legislative compromise of restrictive reform showed the
103 Author's interview with Mexico City lobbyist, La Coalición, 16 November 2006. See also Laborde
Carranco 2007.
104 Keck and Sikkink define information, leverage, symbolic and accountability politics (1998, 21-25).
156
limits of the coalition's moral leverage, since remittances cannot be conditioned or
intermediated. Lacking a true political organization at the national level, Mexico's
migrant diaspora actors remain marginal, but not insignificant as rationalists assume.
Despite criticism of the lobby's limited influence and the compromise nature of the law,
there would have been no legislation without the efforts La Coalición. The network
represents the only instance of concerted political lobbying based on a united front of all
Mexican groups abroad. Since 2005, it has disbanded due to resumption of various
divisions -- regional, partisan, personal-- within the migrant community. The diversity of
the Mexican diaspora has favored migrant efforts at local and state-level organization;
together with the country's own deep divisions and distrust, this diversity and scale of
migrant society has yet to produce an overarching civic organization of Mexicans abroad.
157
Exhibit: Mexican diaspora propaganda
© MX Sin Fronteras, Chicago, IL
158
Political parties: What perceptions, strategies and goals did the movement for
overseas voting rights provoke on the part of elite actors in the main parties and national
legislature? Why did they prolong exclusion for a decade and then opt for restrictive
reform in 2005? In short, political leaders across the three parties agreed to permit a
restrictive regime for overseas voting only when pushed to abandon total exclusion, since
each saw greater risks than opportunity in an open reform. The possibility that the
diaspora could determine the outcome of a close election was an anathema among
insiders, who exaggerated it and reacted with fear; likely scenarios were not scrutinized
publicly, nor did the likelihood of gains for two of the three parties weigh on insider
responses. Instead, all three parties showed splits between rank and file migrant partisans
and party elites over the extent and pace of reform. Party elites did not want to give up
seats and resources to migrant masses and their representatives. The depth of the interparty consensus is evident in the fact that two of three of the parties has yet to invest
material resources to organize its overseas voters,105 despite the massive size of this bloc
of potential voters and the clear electoral incentives to tap into such potential new sources
of support.
Party elites' uncertainty about voter attitudes and electoral controls had led them
to develop a double-game, advocating reform and disguising inaction with procedural
obfuscation. For eleven years between 1994 and 2005, legislators from PRI, PAN and
PRD introduced a total of 19 bills allowing overseas voting before they themselves would
cast a binding vote on one of them. Across parties, leaders were uncertain about the
amount of turnout to expect and about the party preferences of expected voters. Concerns
105 Author's interview with Coordinator for Overseas Mexicans, PAN Executive National Council, Mexico
City, 14 August 2006. Author's interview with Vice President, PRI State Committee, Zacatecas, 26
September 2006.
159
about financial control and dispute resolution raised doubts in their minds; probably,
these party elites feared that the other parties would be able to cheat better than they
would.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI): The PRI reflects the unvarnished
essence behind the elite consensus on overseas voting across the political class that
governs Mexico. After blocking the question while it controlled the majority, the PRI
joined overseas voting bandwagon in 2005, introducing an expansive version of
legislation in the lower house of the Congress. The PRI nevertheless had a well
established doctrine justifying restrictions on overseas political activities according to the
principles of territoriality and control.
PRI doctrine on overseas voting was consistently evident across the sub-national,
national and diaspora realms. The party's state chairman in Puebla cited territory as the
key limit :
Our laws are not extraterritorial, so the US does not have to reach agreement with our
IFE, with our government, and so they did not give these accords to allow them to
campaign there ... it should not be permitted for candidates to go there to campaign
because it would distort the process . . . because if they would even just go there to
campaign, you would see resources from who knows were coming in from abroad.
(translation)106
The PRI argument emphasized the problem of how to control foreign fundraising and
spoke to concerns raised by a recent scandal involving foreign campaign funds in
2000:107
This was a problem (in 2000), that they say they came with money from abroad
without accounting for how much. So imagine that a candidate comes along -- and
this is for all, for PAN, for PRI, for PRD-- who suddenly says, ―Hey I've got money
from abroad.‖ --- ―But you don't even know how much you brought.‖ So I think they
should promote (Presidential voting abroad), but not with candidates going abroad.
106 Author's interview, Secretary General, PRI Committee for the State of Puebla, 18 July 2006, Puebla.
107 In recent years, the IFE had prosecuted the PAN-linked organization Amigos de Fox, which had
imported an unknown amount of funds from Belgium with links to Texas.
160
(translation)108
Hence, in the PRI view, electoral security concerns required overseas elections to be
campaign-free. The chairmen also indicated that the PRI was clear opposed to migrant
representation in Congress, which it sees as a presumable next step on the migrant
agenda.
They also want to participate and have Deputies, no? Representatives. I also do not see
this well, since, well ... a man when he comes to you from there, who are you going to
represent? Whose interests do you represent?
Interviewer: Of the migrants, they say?
Of the migrants, well . . . He does not have representativeness. He would just come to
Congress and take . . . That's what the President of the Republic is for, to defend the
interests of Mexicans abroad. That's why the Congress is here -- for those who stay
here.109
These responses of an overburdened Puebla PRI boss, while blunt, were based on a
detailed briefing and reflected the national party's policy to the letter. A year earlier, PRI
veteran Manuel Bartlett Díaz110 had outlined his party's objections to overseas voting in a
set of questions on the Senate floor:
Is it possible to guarantee what has cost us years of effort, the free, secret vote, without
influences or pressures in the United States? Is it possible to guarantee, for example, the
financing of campaigns? Is it possible to have a limit in relation to the Mexican rules
with CNN, NBC, with U.S. radio stations? Is it possible that the IFE will act there with
firmness to guarantee the constitutional principles on electoral matters, like legality,
impartiality, certainty, objectivity? Does there exist any agreement with the United States
of America so that we can first conduct a census - are there three million, five million,
111
eight million? How many are there? All this obliges us to be very cautious.
Bartlett grounds the argument for caution on the need for electoral security and control,
citing specific U.S. networks to suggest foreign hostility and rekindling doubts about the
108 Author's interview, Secretary General, PRI Committee for the State of Puebla, 18 July 2006, Puebla.
109 Ibid.
110 Bartlett Díaz is an adroit politician accomplished in co-opting agendas that challenge PRI hegemony.
See Snyder for an analysis of oligarchic strategies to reregulate Puebla's coffee industry in an
exclusionary fashion fashioned as Governor in the face of decentralization policies of Salinas de
Gortari (2001, 164, 167-8, 175-92).
111 Senate testimony, Senator Manuel Bartlett Díaz (PRI, Puebla), 24 February 2005, Legislatura: LIX
Año II, Segundo Periodo Ordinario, Diario 9.
161
diaspora.
Can we guarantee impartiality there?, if we are fighting with the media of national
corporations, which are already threatening us? Caution in dealing with money and
television. Now we are establishing a commission that is going to argue with CNN. Thus,
my Senator colleagues, our responsibility goes beyond the immediate political costs,
beyond what sounds good; our responsibility is with this nation, with national
Sovereignty, with non-intervention of any type, with the protection of our territory.
(italics added)
By concluding with references to national sovereignty and non-intervention, Bartlett uses
the core terms of PRI ideology to define overseas voting as an item that requires a stateled response.
These PRI ―dinosaurs‖ and their arguments clearly remain influential.112 The
party's criticism of migrant aspirations for representation in the Congress finds agreement
among Mexican political insiders across parties. These elites differentiate migrant
advocates from the overseas masses, whom they consider to be either apathetic or
oriented to participation in the U.S and not in Mexico. According to a former Foreign
Minister, the overseas voting movement is better understood as a function of the interests
of migrant advocates than the preferences of migrant masses:
I think that, and this is not politically correct at all, that the migrants don't give a
damn about the vote . . . It is their leaders who want to use it as a lever to get elected
to Congress, that is what is driving this, to get to be representatives, which is one
thing . . . not the desires of the migrants, who frankly I don't think at least care a
whole lot.113
While migrant advocates likely do harbor political aspirations, the influence of this view
is noteworthy because it overlooks evidence of serious, sustained interest among broad
segments of Mexico's overseas population in participating in Mexico's national
112 As Lorenzo Meyer stated, ―it's as if the dinosaurs went off into the woods and found a magic plant.
Now they seem to think they can go on forever.‖ Quoted in Jo Tuckman, Return of the dinosaurs Mexico's old guard go back to their one-party ways, Manchester Guardian, 20 December 2007.
113 Author's interview by telephone, former Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations, 13 November 2006.
162
politics.114 In 2009, the PRI regained control of the national legislature and boosted its
chances for the 2012 Presidential election. In light of the party‘s electoral rebound, its
state-nationalist line of opposition to OV expansion is likely to endure.
Interestingly, and somewhat oddly, a hidden anti-migrant bias not only
characterized the PRI, but also the leadership of parties with more widespread ties to
overseas Mexicans and much greater prospects of migrant support. The consensus for
restrictive reform, which emerged only after the migrant lobby forced the question,
emerged from a split between party leadership and base that was replicated across all
three of the parties. As field research discovered, Mexico's elite leadership favored
gradual or no reform, accepting the arguments about territoriality and control, while
opposition party actors at lower levels including especially migrant segments preferred
more expansive versions of reform including credentialization. The evidence that the
leadership of traditional opposition parties also took a similar conservative stance is at
first surprising, especially in the case of the PRD, whose overseas militants had figured
prominently in the binational campaign and sought to claim the mantle of true migrant
party.
National Action (PAN): Strong bonds between the National Action Party (PAN)
and the Mexican diaspora have been strained by the former's governing position since
2001. Overseas voting embodies a continuing contradiction between the bonds of affect
and support among Mexican migrants and a PAN leadership composed of ideological
conservatives and governing elites inclined to adopt PRI arguments on the topic. In 2000,
114 McCann et al (2006) document definite interest in continuing political participation among a
substantial minority of Mexicans abroad, with between 25% and 40% responding favorably to
questions about holding monthly discussions of Mexican politics and hoping to vote in future
elections. Their detailed analysis confirms the conclusion more certainly than similar earlier evidence
located in the Pew Hispanic Survey of November, 2005.
163
Vicente Fox had spurred migrant leaders to engage in a large postcard writing campaign,
and his administration had introduced and sought to advance overseas voting legislation
to the Congress. The PAN had also included two migrant candidates among its field of
candidates who were elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 2006. Dolores Sánchez and
Andres Bermúdez represented a considerable base of pro-PAN sentiment among migrant
communities. Moreover, the PAN had dominated the 2006 vote and had broad support
abroad. Among a number of factors attracting migrant adherents were the party's
historical opposition to the PRI, its anti-government ideology and economic doctrine of
mobility and entrepreneurship, regional ties with northwestern emigration states that were
PAN strongholds, as well as the charisma of candidate Vicente Fox.
Nevertheless, the PAN supported restrictive reform in 2005 and refrained from
overseas activities in 2006. And even after the election, the party remained opposed to
credentialization. As PAN Senator close to the leadership made clear, the party line on
overseas voting is gradualism, and nothing more:
No, we are not in favor of emitting credentials abroad, because our principle has
always been the principle of gradualism, to shape the electoral system. With
effectiveness and to rule out the possibility of an intervention by a foreign power
through the overseas vote. Any further reform that is going to come will have the
form of a modest reform. 115
The Senator's invocation of foreign powers showed the growing resemblance of PAN
doctrine to the longstanding PRI argument against overseas participation. Migrant
panistas were angered that the party's conservatism extended to overseas voting rules,
and one migrant deputy argued that the arrogance of power had led it astray:
Of course (the PAN) is against it! When you're on top, you think that you don't need
anyone . . . that's exactly what the PAN has got right now . . . they fear that the
migrant may grasp too much power, that he may bring his own candidates, make his
115 Author's interview, Senator (PAN, Mexico state) & Sub-coordinator Foreign Policy, PAN legislative
group, México DF, 6 November 2006.
164
own party. These things frighten the politicians and the parties. (translation)116
But the party's internal consensus, defined by its conservative leadership, makes it
reluctant to commit resources to overseas party organization, as the Senator explained.
Within the National Committee of the PAN, there is some division or lack of
coordination plaguing the effort to seek outreach to migrants. So we see the
competent hands of one isolated individual, the Overseas Voting Coordinator,
working alone in a ―unipersonal‖ office setting. One person alone, and with no
resources. This sort of project requires greater resources. 117
The top leadership remains reluctant to pursue migrants as a constituency, as the Senator
said:
I think this is because of the perspective in the leadership. What you need is leadership
with a personal vision of including the migrants in the party, and that is not completely
there. Another reform the party ought to adhere to better (since it has promised it once
already) is that all communities should have designated local outreach officers to the
overseas Mexican community.118
The cool attitude in turn causes grumbling in the ranks.
The parties are all the same. The migrants, we are waking up and we are going to
keep advancing politically here and on the other side because we envision a
humanitarian politics. Even though the Panistas approved it, the PRI approved it,
they are have fear.
The tension is remarkable given the extent of grassroots potential for the PAN among
diaspora voters. Furthermore, the party's media-oriented politics aimed and its appeal to
upwardly mobile voters add to its unrealized potential among the Mexican diaspora.
Nevertheless, its conservative base and proximity to the government indicates an
enduring tension with migrant aspirations. Any efforts to expand PAN outreach will be a
delicate task, and probably quite limited.
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD): Of the three parties, the left-wing
populist PRD had developed the most progressive doctrine of migrant political
participation. Ever since Cárdenas' campaign visits to California in 1988, it has had a pro116 Author's interview, Deputy (PAN, Zacatecas), Chamber of Deputies, 9 November 2006, Mexico City.
117 Author's interview, Senator (Mexico state), PAN legislative group Sub-coordinator Foreign Policy.
118 Ibid.
165
migrant doctrine inspired by an authentic transnational vision, and it favored expansive
overseas voting reform within a new sixth circumscription reform for migrant
representation in the national legislature. The PRD also has governed in two leading
migration states, Michoacán and Zacatecas, and since 2002, it has structured its internal
elections to include emigrant members, reaching a participation of 3,000 overseas PRD
militants. From grassroots migrant activists to the Senate, the PRD included among its
ranks a broad base committed to expansive overseas voting.
At the center of the PRD line on migrant voting are the party's focus on
organizing overseas Mexicans and its efforts to develop a viable transnational politics for
overseas Mexicans facing double exclusion. A leading PRD Senator from Zacatecas
explained the basic principle guiding PRD doctrine:
First, I think that Mexicans who live in the U.S. are part of the people of Mexico
who do not have their rights recognized. Their political rights in Mexico and
those acquired in the U.S. by their work. So we believe that their participation
and their political influence is very small in both countries. (translation)119
The Senator linked objections to overseas voting to the government's historical fear of
mobilizing the migrant segment:
These (objections) are curtains of smoke, fundamentally what you have is a fear
that a different form of voting, for example with polling stations, generates
mobilization within the Mexican community in the U.S. and a consequential
organization . . the Mexican government has always had a fear that the
community there organizes because then it would demand its rights with more
force. (translation)120
The PRD has recognized the major problem of double exclusion facing undocumented
Mexican workers, and it has begun to address the need for pursuing political rights both
in Mexico and in the U.S. The PRD's emphasis on organization has led it not only to
119 Author's interview, ex-Senator and Federal Deputy (PRD, Zacatecas), Chairman on Constitutional
Reform, Chamber of Deputies, Mexico City, 30 October 2006.
120 Ibid.
166
support expansive version of overseas voting that includes credentialization, public
campaigns and collective voting, but also to propose direct representation of migrants
through the creation of a sixth regional district. Though highly improbable,121 the sixth
district proposal is one of variety of uphill battles identified by the PRD to organize the
emigrant millions with a stronger motivation than Presidential voting. Other initiatives
include U.S. incorporation strategies, regional development efforts, as well as efforts to
form public spaces outside the government.
Two counter-tendencies within the party signified vulnerabilities that would
undermine the party's strong pro-voting position in 2005-06.122 First, the party has a
penchant for all-or-nothing solutions accompanied by mass protest marches, along with
an institutional weakness in the realms of negotiation and second-best solutions. At the
same time, a second tradition of barely reconfigured PRI politics characterized an
important segment that had split off from the ruling party. The features of the latter
segment included nationalism, paternalism, and a cynical and often corrupt manipulation
of extreme positions. These two counter-trends came together in 2005-06 in the PRD's
treatment of overseas voting, first in the legislation process, and then in particular during
the dramatic campaign loss of candidate Andres Manuel López Obrador.
The PRD's internal split between massive reform and cynical conservatism
surfaced first in the legislative process in 2005, reflecting a growing distance between
121 Mexico is divided into five regional circumscriptions, or regional districts, in which voters elect 40
deputies to the national Congress. Creating a sixth district would require taking seats from the first
five. The PRD's proposal would establish an additional region for the U.S., from which migrants would
elect an equal number of their own to the national Congress. The massive weighting of the diaspora is
based on the PRD's generous estimates of the Mexican diaspora as equal in size to one fifth of the
nation, which relies either on a massive overcount of emigrants or inclusion of U.S. citizens of
Mexican ethnicity.
122 These and other tensions have since blown up into a major internal split over renewing the party
leadership that threatens to lead to the end of the PRD if it continues unabated.
167
migrant activists and top party leadership. When the voting bill moved from the House to
the Senate in March, a pivotal PRI Senator and committee chair substituted a restrictive
bill, seeking to divide migrant advocates with the difficult choice of whether to support or
oppose restrictive reform. The main lobbyists of La Coalición recognized the choice
between a second-best proposal or quitting the game altogether, but they faced a tough
battle in convincing their multi-party coalition of members to stay together for the
reduced prize. A brief but loud internal debate occurred with the protests and defection of
PRD supporters from Chicago and Los Angeles nearly derailing the lobbying effort. But
the PRD leadership in the Congress stayed in and supported the restrictive bill in the end,
despite its preferences for a large-scale reform.
The split between PRD leadership and its migrant militants surfaced again during
the implementation stage, behind the scenes, when the party's Presidential candidate
rejected a proposal to register PRD voters abroad and win the overseas vote. A leading
PRD Deputy explained the surprising rebuff that candidate López Obrador dealt his
proposal.
After the law was approved, I went and I presented to AMLO a project to organize the
perredistas in the US to be able to win the overseas election, with numerical goals,
county by county . . . But AMLO was not interested because I think he-- although he
didn't say it-- he did not want to leave the country physically and in terms of the
campaign. (translation)123
The remarkable decision by López Obrador to turn down a migrant outreach effort
suggests two conclusions, one about the candidate and one about the political realities as
he then assessed them. First, it points out the strong isolationist streak in the candidate's
personality, as someone who had never traveled abroad and who here declined again the
123 Author's interview, ex-Federal Deputy, PRD, 18 December 2006, Mexico City. Due to the law's
prohibition on overseas campaigning, the proposal centered on registration drives without a partisan
message, anticipating likely PRD gains from efforts at grassroots levels away from the pro-PAN
communities linked to the consulates.
168
call to step beyond the territory. The enormous success of such a candidate in a selfidentified global nation is itself a telling irony, which points out the power of nationalism
as it is institutionalized in state structures and rooted locally throughout the Mexican
polity. Secondly, beyond the candidate's gut-level inclination, it is likely that he also
calculated that the proposal would cause problems or might be a loser, for various
reasons. First, the IFE was at the time using its discretionary powers of implementation to
craft restrictive guidelines that would severely limit overseas campaigning, a fact that the
candidate had to consider. Furthermore, since he felt he knew how to win at home,
perhaps he did not trust that votes abroad would help him. But our source suggested that
the candidate miscalculated:
He minimized what he could have won from the overseas vote. He did not consider it
important. In retrospect I would say that it could have been the definitive vote. Maybe
there wouldn't have been the 250,000 votes that we needed but it was one of the factors
(in his narrow losing margin). And if half a million had voted instead of 40,000, I'm
sure that it would have been a very important vote for AMLO, and he did not grasp this
very clearly in this moment, but it was. And it was not that difficult, simply to help the
IFE and the consulates to distribute the forms that were free. (translation)124
Eschewing compromise, the PRD leader sacrificed his legion's principled
commitments only to become tangled in a politics of manipulation. In the PRD
leadership, as in all of Mexico's parties, there is little interest in overseas voting.
Remarkably, then, for all of the ideological differences and fierce partisan competition
that characterized party relations in Mexico in 2006, the three major parties‘ convergence
in support of reform reflected the tentative victory of conservative party leaders over
lower-level militants rooted in migrant communities. If all three parties shared the same
position, then where did the party leaders take their cues?
State actors: The Federal Electoral Institute and above all the Foreign Ministry
124 Author's interview, ex-Federal Deputy, PRD, 18 December 2006, Mexico City.
169
played pivotal roles in steering the overseas voting reform both toward the late, restrictive
legislation and toward the cautious implementation that followed. Whereas President Fox
was inadequately forceful as an advocate, bureaucratic interests led these two units to
actively stall and then to guide legislator opinions in the direction of restrictive reform.
The call for emigrant voting ran against the command model at the heart of the SRE's
bureaucratic organization, provoking logistical and political concerns with voting. This
opposition evolved in the collaboration of Foreign Ministry officials with the IFE and the
leadership of all three parties. The institutional structure of these two units of the
Mexican state—defined as the preferences and capacities of the electoral commission and
a professional foreign ministry with a formidable, autonomous governing structure in the
consulates- decisively swayed skeptical legislators away from open overseas voting.
Federal Electoral Institute (IFE): The IFE has been both an obstacle to and a
necessary ally of the overseas voting movement. Its organizational structure makes it
slow to move, conservative and costly, but also a source of technical competence and
bureaucratic capacities. Driving IFE actions on overseas voting have been its legal
obligations to implement electoral law in addition to its mixed organizational interest in
minimizing risk and gaining resources. As well, its professionalism and impulse toward
bureaucratic expansion have given wind to a progressive orientation within its inherent
conservatism. IFE gradualism has played a part in the politics of delay and postponement,
yet after the 2006 implementation it stands as a key source for measured expansion of
overseas voting. It has housed important proponents of the overseas vote, from early days
to the recent creation of the Coordination of Overseas Voting unit (COVE). IFE support
for a painstakingly thorough and gradual approach to overseas voting reform took shape
170
under the leadership of José Woldenberg, the director of Mexico's federal electoral
institute under the traditional ruling PRI party government of Ernesto Zedillo.125 The
1998 commission issued a positive conclusion as to the feasibility of the vote for the
2000 Presidential election.126
The IFE has sought to direct the implementation of overseas voting according to
its core principles and material interests, at the expense of more participatory
formulations. The IFE's basic institutional interests lie in minimizing risks and securing
the territorial control, information and resources necessary for Mexican national
elections. In this light, overseas voting represented a major new risk and a potentially
enormous new task. IFE director Luis Carlos Ugalde sought to insulate his bureaucracy
from blame, protect it from risk, and win it more resources.
IFE campaign regulations of 2005 were a key part of the restrictive format for the
2006 cycle. The 2005 guidelines were explicitly prohibitive of overseas campaign
activities, coming as they did in the wake of the 2000 Friends of Fox case that had
tarnished the ruling PAN government‘s reputation and the PRI‘s massive misuse of state
oil company funds during the same 2000 campaign cycle. Furthermore, the 2005
regulations were taken seriously by the leadership of the PAN and the PRI, both having
borne major financial and criminal punishments so recently as a result of their 2000
misdeeds. In other words, the ruling parties past and present took very seriously the IFE‘s
edict to freeze overseas campaigns in 2005-06.
As a result of the IFE‘s 2005 regulations, the parties cancelled their plans to build
125 A former student activist and ex-member of the PRD, Woldenberg had been appointed by Zedillo's
conservative secretary of the interior Jorge Carpizo as director of the citizen-based electoral
organization and faced the challenging task of directing the rules for Mexico's political pluralization.
126 p. 3, IFE, Informe final que presenta la Comisión de Especialistas, 12 November 1998.
171
overseas organizations, as the PAN‘s overseas coordinator explains in regard to his party:
We had representatives that were approved and regulated by basic norms for the
organization of the party in the US. This was OK‘d by the IFE before the electoral
process in 2005 . . . but when the IFE approved the specific lines for the functioning of
the campaign there, this structure was in effect frozen. (translation)127
The effects went beyond the PAN as well. When contacted by PRD campaign leaders,
the IFE informed them that its candidate would not be allowed to campaign abroad and
that the physical presence of its candidate abroad would be considered a campaign
activity, and the same for press conferences held for foreign media.128
In the absence of such restrictive regulations, overseas organization would surely
have been greater in the 2006 election. Nevertheless, there remains a two-sided aspect to
the IFE‘s doctrine of gradual controlled expansion of democratic participation—the
―system of mistrust‖ that has been the best hope for competitive electoral politics in the
nation‘s history. A paradoxical result is that Mexico has become a global innovator in
overseas voting with leading, state-of-the art technology and administrative systems, all
the while marshalling these impressive capacities toward the dubious achievement of
record low participation in 2006. The difficulty of voting from abroad together with the
broader national controversy involving allegations of domestic fraud have damaged the
IFE‘s prestige, at home and in the diaspora. But the organization‘s technical capacities
and slow-but-steady record of consensus-building and electoral effectiveness point to its
survival and resilience, generally and in particular in relation to overseas voting.
The restrictiveness of the first exercise notwithstanding, the transparent and
thorough nature of Mexico‘s implementation has created the bureaucratic groundwork for
127 Author‘s interview, Director of Overseas Organization, PAN Executive National Committee, Mexico
City, 16 August 2006.
128 PRD Deputy and campaign director for overseas organization, Comments at special seminar, El voto
de los mexicanos en el exterior: Realidad actual, agenda de reforma, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo
de México, Centro para Estudios y Programas Interamericanos, México DF, 4 December 2006.
172
a gradual, continued expansion of the vote in future elections. The 2006 results of very
low participation and uncontested results present a mixed record that is also conducive to
gradual expansion.129 In this, the IFE continues to play a role as necessary ally.
Ministry of Foreign Relations (SRE): The overt opposition to migrant voting in
the Mexico's political ruling class originated within its Secretaría de Relaciones
Exteriores (SRE) in its historical relationship with the PRI. Decades of PRI hegemony
endured according to a clear division of labor defined territorially: the PRI would
organize Mexican workers and elections internally in the national territory, while
externally the Foreign Ministry would handle the protection of Mexican migrants. Over
seven decades of PRI rule, the SRE honed its part of the arrangement in line with
international law to form Mexico's foreign policy doctrine of non-intervention. Based on
a Weberian bureaucratic model of hierarchy and state-led political organization, this
doctrine never contemplated migrant self-organization, but it had a ready line for fending
off external interventions in its legal proscriptions on foreign agents and rights.130
The Foreign Ministry had equally strong institutional and political reasons to
oppose overseas voting, and its interjection in opposition at a crucial moment in the
Senate hearing was important in steering legislators toward a restrictive reform. Staffed
by a career foreign service and governed by hierarchical chain of command directed in
Mexico City, the organization has no interest in overseas electoral activities, which
129 According to the Director, the IFE received three complaints but dismissed them as groundless, actions
that were not challenged. And none of the parties submitted post-electoral legal claims on overseas
voting to the national electoral tribunal. Author's interview with the Director, IFE Coordinator of the
Overseas Vote (COVE), 11 September 2006, Mexico City.
130 Gómez Arnau 1990, 111-113. The Calvo doctrine of 1861 stated that foreign expatriates could give up
their international rights in particular situations. It was formalized in the Mexican Constitution of 1917,
which (i) established that only Mexican nationals had the right to acquire ownership of land and
mineral rights and (ii) required foreign nationals investing in Mexican real estate to renounce the
protection of their governments and sign a waiver at the Foreign Ministry acknowledging the Mexican
state's discretion to seize properties in case of breach of contract.
173
represent distractions and potential problems for its diplomatic officers. The consuls in
diaspora cities were particularly alarmed, sensing themselves vulnerable to campaign
controversy, post-election protests and negative media attention.
In its leadership and throughout its consular infrastructure, the SRE has opposed
mass voting by Mexicans abroad and favored no voting throughout the institutionbuilding process. During the years of lobbying, the SRE was cool to the overseas voting
movement. From the beginning of the Fox administration, elites at the Foreign Ministry,
beginning with Chancellor Jorge Castañeda himself, viewed transnational politics as
problematic in relation to the primary diplomatic goal of negotiating a migrant accord.131
At middle and lower levels throughout the ranks of the foreign service and the more than
50 consulates in the US, diplomatic officers viewed migrant voting as a massive
headache at best.132 In the prospect of large-scale elections, the diplomatic corps feared a
new mandate outside of its traditional expertise and purview, in which it would have to
work closely with—and open consular administration and foreign policy up to— a set of
Mexican federations and clubs that it perceived as fractious and poorly led. During
Castañeda‘s brief but eventful tenure, Mexican diaspora entrepreneurs had already proved
to be a political liability for the new Administration‘s foreign policy team: Juan
Hernandez, Mexican-American Fox ally, sought to parlay the enthusiasm of pro-Fox
networks in California and Texas into an aggressive campaign to reorganize Mexico‘s US
diplomacy from the new President‘s side at Los Pinos. The result was the Office of
Mexicans in the Exterior (OME), a Presidential unit of diaspora outreach and
131 Author's interview, former Chancellor, via telephone, México DF-New York, 13 November 2006.
132 Author's interviews with Mexico City lobbyist of La Coalición, 16 October 2006, and with an exFederal Deputy, PRD responsible for the study and analysis of overseas voting in the Chamber of
Deputies, 18 December 2006.
174
Washington-focused campaigning inside the executive mansion. Confronted with this
bureaucratic encroachment, the SRE ultimately prevailed: it managed to have Fernández‘
creation integrated into the Foreign Ministry at Tlatelolco as the re-designated Institute of
Mexicans in the Exterior (IME). But the OME affair was a costly distraction for the new
Chancellor, himself a maverick within the Mexican political establishment. The
experience fit with his view of diaspora entrepreneurship as individualistic selfpromotion, unpredictable and potentially damaging to Mexico‘s foreign policy.
The Foreign Ministry exerted its influence in framing the debate on overseas
voting with a powerful argument about Mexico‘s national interest. During the legislative
deliberations of 2005, Luis Ernesto Derbez, Castañeda‘s successor at the SRE, articulated
the fundamental strategic issue at stake for the nation in a message that resonated with the
Congressional leadership, thus far concerned with the particular partisan consequences of
the overseas elections. For Derbez and other members of Mexico's foreign policy
community, Mexico faced a choice— either overseas voting or an immigration accord
with the U.S. The Foreign Ministry was understandably sensitive to the political climate
in Washington dominated by the ―war on terrorism,‖ hardened borders, and antiimmigrant eruptions; it feared a U.S. backlash against Mexican migrants in the event of a
highly visible display of Mexican patriotism on U.S. soil. In this view, immigration
reform and the long-distance vote were mutually exclusive, not complementary as
enthusiasts of Mexican migrant transnationalism had argued. Thus, large-scale overseas
voting would run the risk of exacerbating U.S. nationalism, bringing harm to overseas
Mexicans and derailing Mexico‘s foreign policy entirely.
The national interest argument amplified a Huntingtonian vision of U.S. politics
175
that was pervasive among Mexican elites sensitive to nativism north of the border. It
touched on deep fears of national embarrassment in Washington triggered by displays of
Mexican patriotism. From the start of the administration of President Vicente Fox, the
primary foreign policy priority had been, and remained, an immigration deal with the
U.S. The Foreign Ministry was therefore particularly sensitive to the groundswell of antiimmigration sentiment building in the U.S. in 2005. Especially feared was the possibility
of a Mexican electoral dispute or crisis inside the U.S., which it was imagined would
generate forceful anti-Mexican xenophobia and wipe out any chance whatsoever of
achieving anything in negotiations with the U.S.
A leading PRD Senator testified to the influence of the national interest argument
and explained the restrictive legislation in precisely these terms, addressing Mexican
emigrants at a roundtable panel discussion in Los Angeles: ―the principal idea that limited
the legislators on the voto en el extranjero was the fear of doing anything to annoy the
U.S. government‖ (translation).133 Referring to the Foreign Ministry in particular, he
stated that ―the Mexican government going all the way back has not moved a finger to
organize the Mexicans abroad.‖ He went on to identify the link between the Mexican
foreign ministry‘s traditionally passive attitude toward migrant organization and the
attitudes of the political insiders at home: ―for the political class, this creates fear in two
ways: they don‘t want there to be a strong class that will pressure them and they don‘t
want to annoy the US government.‖ In the left-wing PRD view, the capacities for holding
overseas elections clearly exist. The Senator concluded that ―as we see with the Matricula
Consular, it would have been easy (to organize a participatory election), but this would
133 Mexican Senator Raymundo Cardenas, PRD-Zacatecas, Comments as panelist (author‘s translation),
Roundtable discussion of Mexico‘s Voto en el Extranjero, First Annual Convention of the Consejo de
Federaciones Mexicanas (COFEM), Los Angeles, 27 October 2006.
176
have meant migrant citizens moving in the streets.‖134
The PRD Senator‘s critique merits detailed citation since it goes to the heart of
double exclusion, with a vision of transnational politics that is hard-edged and strategic
while also open to elements of complementarity and resident country incorporation.
Raymundo Cardenas is a former Marxist from Zacatecas who is at home with PRD-style
confrontational politics, fond of protest marches, hostile to the IFE, and instinctively
mistrustful of U.S. power. He uses his critique to support his party‘s line in favor of a
massively open overseas election involving full-scale legislative representation with a
sixth regional district for the Mexican diaspora. In contrast to López Obrador and many
other PRD colleagues who share this inclination, however, Cardenas‘ approach to power
and deal-making focuses on process, legislation and negotiation. The goal of collective
organization in his view is political change through legislation and reform, not
caciquismo and protest for protest‘s sake— an evaluation that the Senator‘s behavior and
decision-making generally bear out. Cardenas‘ political reasoning and positioning reflect
a clear distinction from the recent national PRD norm, which has come to disregarded
governance and the delivery of goods through reform.
Cardenas assesses Mexico‘s national interest much differently than the political
establishment does. The risks from open overseas voting have been overstated, he argues.
Mexican emigrants are already suffering abuse in the U.S. at the hands of arbitrary
policing and terror from right-wing vigilante groups. An electoral demonstration could
not make their condition worse, he argues; rather collective organization would enhance
their strength to deflect the certain assaults – through the power of numbers and more
134 ibid.
177
skillful, concerted strategies of legal and civic defense. Interestingly, although Cardenas
is hardly glowing in his attitude to the U.S., his view allows room for a much more
benign environment in the resident country than Mexican state-nationalists assume. It just
might be that U.S. society would tolerate Mexicans voting from abroad, perhaps even
lending moral support to their efforts to spur democratization in the neighbor to the south.
In fact, the U.S. government gave full support to the Mexican government to conduct
overseas voting in the manner it saw fit, in keeping with emerging international protocol
for resident countries and as part of the reciprocal interest of the U.S. in the voting rights
of nearly 1 million U.S. overseas citizens residing in Mexico.135 Cardenas critique allows
us to see through the false notion of a receiving country hostile to overseas voting. It
opens the possibility for complementarity between resident and home country activism,
for a meaningful binational activism that transnationalists espouse, but is much more
knowing about Mexico‘s domestic politics.
The influential intervention by the SRE came in 2005 at a pivotal moment in the
legislative process. The Foreign Minister‘s testimony sought to block the overseas voting
bill entirely, and it nearly succeeded.136 In 2006, during the registration phase, the SRE
collaborated with the IFE to restrain efforts to enroll overseas voters, which only avoided
complete failure by the intervention of IME counselors.
The causal significance of the SRE's opposition lies first in its influence as an
opinion-maker and simultaneously in its local presence and political centrality in diaspora
cities. First as an opinion-maker, the SRE tipped the political balance against expansive
legislation, toward a restrictive law. The key moment came on March 16, 2005. When
135 Author‘s interview, former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere, Washington, 3 May 2006.
136 Herrera, Jorge. 2005. SRE estima poco factible voto foráneo en 2006. El Universal, Mexico City, 16
March.
178
Secretary Derbez openly enunciated the control and territorial arguments and
simultaneously argued that overseas voting would work against the chances of migration
reform, he galvanized the shared concerns and uncertainties about overseas voting across
parties among elite Mexican politicians. Derbez' testimony appeared to sink the overseas
voting, which had been put forward in the form of a massively expansive ―transatlantic‖
format as a wide open target:
Between Ugalde and Derbez, they bombarded the ―transatlantic‖ proposal . . .
overseas voting was not convenient, and like all the others, they said ―yes, but in
reality no‖. For a human reason, and a political reason: the human reason is who
wants more work than he already has? The political reason was that the elections
were going to be very competitive and the overseas vote could spoil it for them.
―Because the system is not right, because there may be irregularities . . . this might
make a lot of noise. Yes but no then.‖ The target was perfect.
Derbez added principled objections to the IFE director's testimony emphasizing
logistical challenges. Ugalde detailed the administrative challenges and expensive costs
that overseas voting would entail; his essential message was that IFE was not opposed, its
support could be bought, but it would be expensive ($300 million dollars, precisely). By
contrast, for the Foreign Minister, halting the proposal was a matter of national security.
The most devastating attack was by Ugalde and Derbez. Ugalde had an advantage,
since after him comes Derbez whom many migrants knew through the IME. So,
when Derbez exaggerates -- because he exaggerated considerably -- it's he who
becomes the ―enemy‖ of the vote and not Ugalde. Derbez was more critical than the
IFE because he said that he was in agreement with all of the objections that the IFE
was putting ―and, furthermore, I have more.‖ (translation)137
The political effect of the national interest argument was to reframe overseas
voting debate in such a way as to provide legislators with cover for politically convenient
decisions to support an extremely restrictive law. Specifically, the national interest line
identified a valid potential scenario of overseas electoral controversy and re-interpreted it
through the powerful ideological lens of Mexican state-nationalism. For party leaders,
137 Author's interview with Mexico City lobbyist of La Coalición, 16 October 2006.
179
this added a major new liability to the existing uncertainties about OV‘s direct electoral
consequences, which the Coalición lobby had attempted to mollify with reference to
various studies projecting moderate and balanced turnout at most. Overseas voting gone
wrong, in this view, would destroy any prospects for immigration reform and galvanize
anti-immigration forces intent on injuring Mexicans abroad. Confronted with the prospect
of an affront to the U.S., amidst the daily stream of reports of violations by the securityobsessed North Americans, leaders saw expansive overseas voting in new light. Mexican
elites could honestly look across the table to their counterparts from rival parties and
agree that expansive overseas voting in 2006 would not only be unsettling to each
electorally, but more importantly, it would be a disservice to Mexicans at home and
abroad, damaging the co-national emigrants‘ safety and setting back its democracy. .
Secondly, as a critical bureaucratic presence in diaspora cities, the SRE played a
negative role in overseas voting implementation in 2006, with its consulates and the IFE
failing to promote the vote as tasked. The discrepancy between the three million forms
sent to the consulates and the 45,000 voters registered confirms testimony from focus
groups, interviews and news reports that the consulates mainly held registration materials
closely and then dumped them. Only in the last month of the enrollment period, with
registrations at 3,000, did IME counselors tied to migrant groups in the US prevail upon
the consulates to distribute the formats more liberally, which resulted in net registrations
for the month of 40,000 and saved the registration implementation from complete
failure.138
Subnational actors: Given Mexico's large scale and regional heterogeneity, an
138 Ibid and Focus Group testimony at the Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior, 4 October 2006.
180
important component of migrant diaspora politics occurs at subnational levels. The
significance of translocal politics to the process of forming Mexico's national overseas
voting institution is complex but relevant as a source of indirect causation.139 While
Mexican migrant federations and clubs have not attained an influential presence in
national politics, they have provided key raw material for the binational lobbying
network.140 Puebla and Zacatecas are diverse cases with variation in political openness
and migrant political organization. Puebla reflects an exaggerated version of Mexico's
fierce exclusion of marginalized groups along with its acute absence of shared trust,
while Zacatecas shows a broader consensus in favor of openness to migrants and a more
institutionalized collaboration between state government and migrant groups.
Pueblan diaspora actors have responded with transnational entrepreneurship
exemplified by the leadership of two persons. Carlos Olamendi has invigorated a
privately funded state-chartered office for the attention of migrants, while Joel Magallán
has led the religious Asociación Tepeyac in New York for two decades to dispense all
range of services not provided by the government. Their bids to provide social relief and
formulate policies on behalf of Puebla's emigrants reflect the dire reality of the state's
emigrant communities and the organized neglect practiced by its political elites.
Interestingly, both leaders have been involved in the overseas voting movement, with
Olamendi one of five principal partners of the binational lobby.
Zacatecas stands in contrast to Puebla for the longer history and larger scale of its
own diaspora, along with the more institutionalized nature of migrant-state relations.
139 Smith and Bakker (2007, 20) describe the activities of hometown clubs and federations as translocal,
since they occur across national borders but also remain local or regional in nature.
140 Author's interview, La Coalición lobbyist and investigator, Instituto Mora, Mexico City, 19 September
2006.
181
Highlights of emigrant politics in Zacatecas include the hometown associations and the
local policy innovations that they have stimulated. In 2003, the legislature recognized
Zacatecans abroad as citizens and established their right to vote in state elections.
However, the absence of overseas voting in Zacatecas points out that politics has been a
secondary realm for migrant participation.
Puebla and Zacatecas diverge in the extent of institutionalization of their emigrant
politics, but they do not differ in overseas voting outcomes at the state level. Translocal
politics at the subnational level are diverse and by definition distinct from national
politics. However, they have also been a significant secondary factor related to the
overseas voting movement, principally in the venues and human talent that they have
provided for the binational coalition.
IV
Instituting the Extraterritorial Polity: State-led remittances
Mexico's intermediate outcome in 2005-06 was a partial accommodation of
migrant demands as well as an instance of continuity in the political exclusion of
migrants. It was the direct result of deliberate actions by legislators to specify in the law
restrictive measures for voting, with the 2005 law reflecting an elite consensus for
restrictive voting as the least worst option. Field interviews confirmed Parra's analysis of
legislators' preferences. The PRI hoped for no reform, the PAN favored restrictive reform,
and the PRD called for a massive open extraterritorial reform. With intense pressure from
migrant lobbyists upon legislators to vote on a reform bill, restrictive reform emerged as
the consensus choice as the least worst option .
This much is known, and it corresponds to the existing descriptive research of the
182
outcome and the events leading up to it presented in the prior section.141 However, the
extremely risk-averse behavior of Mexican political actors stands out as remarkable,
especially when considered in light of comparable cases of other labor export
democratizers, in which parties view diaspora contacts as a potential source of resources
to be actively developed and electorally mobilized. The contribution of this analysis is to
explain the convergence of preferences in favor of restrictiveness on the part of Mexican
party leaders across a vigorously competitive political spectrum, despite burgeoning
resource flows from abroad and the enormous potential in votes and campaign funds
abroad available for capture. Something acted to block the incentive effects that we
would expect from political competitiveness. The key causal mechanisms, I argue, lie in
the ways that institutional structures shape the interactions of political elites and
emerging diaspora actors. What caused the move forward to voting legislation in 2005
was the binational lobbying campaign; what drove home elite resistance to reform
throughout followed by the adoption of restrictive voting was the strong argument by the
Foreign Ministry about the territorial sovereignty with overseas elections.
The political effects of labor export between diaspora and state actors flow in both
directions, requiring a conception of state-led political remittances to capture the ways in
which state actors influence and direct overseas citizens. Within its acercamiento
doctrine, the Mexican government has developed a broad policy repertoire for engaging
its diaspora, including enhanced consular services, civic organizations, collective
investment, cultural activities-- anything but voting. In Mexico, transnational
entrepreneurship related to emigrant politics consisted in large part (although not
141 Author's research, Calderón and Martínez 2004, Parra 2005.
183
exclusively) in the bureaucratic innovation of state actors in the foreign ministry, the state
governments, and the national electoral commissions. A leading example is Carlos
González Gutierrez, the Director of the Institute for Mexicans in the Exterior (IME), who
has provided the main strategic intellectual and leadership behind Mexico's acercamiento
policy within the Foreign Ministry for two decades. González' vision has shaped the
IME's model of state-led social service provision and support for a transnational
―network of networks‖ uniting overseas Mexicans in systematic dialogue with the
government. The IME program has taken on a particular importance given the country's
rejection of open electoral institutions. Despite its restrictive voting rules, Mexico has
earned a reputation for bureaucratic innovation in state-diaspora programs among labor
export governments across the global level, as a result of efforts by González and other
state actors.
A different instance of state-led entrepreneurship in Mexico is evident in the
efforts of Mexican electoral authorities to locate, define and elaborate a ―global state of
art‖ in overseas voting administration. Ironically, Mexico has become a global innovator
on overseas voting even as it has continued to uphold important de facto limits on
overseas voting. In the 1990s, the overseas voting area had been an international policy
vacuum. Electoral authorities in Mexico and other developing countries came together in
international technical bodies in search of resources for resolving their own national
administrative challenges. Motivating the collaboration was a shared set of desires to
legitimize fledgling democracies, identify best practices based on comparative learning
and pooled data, and establish enduring institutions for overseas participation. Drawing
upon support from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
184
(IDEA) and the International Foundation for Elections Systems (IFES), the epistemic
network of electoral experts has advanced a new set of institutional standards for
overseas voting at the international system level, which now exists as a meaningful
normative reality for other developing countries.142 This process shows how Mexico's
electoral authority has developed significant bureaucratic capacities, namely in the part of
an internal braintrust that has internalized democratic norms and developed overseas
voting expertise, but that these capacities will be deployed only as the conditions of
Mexico's political transition will permit.143
Consulates and their officers play a central role in diaspora politics as the public
symbol of the nation-state's legitimacy and the physical site of public venues for overseas
nationals. State structure is a powerful reality rooted in the sovereignty principle and
sanctioned by the international system. This point is evident if we imagine the
perspective of an expatriate citizen intent on politically reconnecting with his or her
global nation at a pivotal historical or electoral moment. Long-distance participation
raises a few concrete questions. Where is the public space and what are the rules for
access to that space? Who runs the government and where is it? At this point, emigrant
belonging to a separate home country is not just a subjective matter of identity; to remain
real, it requires public institutions, which involve state structures due to the nature of the
international system. Generally, due to the Westphalian institution of territoriality, the
consular infrastructure stands out not only as critical signifier of nation, but also as
physical arena for public affairs abroad and pipes connecting diaspora to national
142 In 2007, the IDEA Handbook on External Voting was co-published by Stockholm-based IDEA and
Mexico's IFE, with the latter's Carlos Navarro an instrumental contributor.
143 The Mexico-led diffusion of overseas voting expertise also has implications for world polity theory,
including important evidence of mechanisms in the relationship between nation-state actors and
epistemic communities.
185
structures at home.
A leading PRD Senator discussed the role of Mexican consulates as an obstacle to
autonomous migrant organization. Responding to a question about the challenge of
migrant organization, he contrasted the prestige of the Mexican Consul in Los Angeles
and the leadership of a newly formed migrant organization called the Council of Mexican
Federations (COFEM).
Interviewer: how do you unite the migrant community without the government?
You have to do it, it is an issue of maturity, you have to do it. Because, look, who
conducted the meeting of the COFEM, the closing ceremony, who directed it?
Who gave the last word? The Consul Beltrán. This is a very clear image that the
COFEM does not have the independence that a political entity must have if it is
going to make people listen in Mexico and Washington.
The Mexican diaspora lacks and badly needs an umbrella organization, in the Senator's
view:
No such entity exists. La Coalición maybe, but it is very small, it still does not
represent what it ought to represent. Some leaders of the federations may be on
the way, they may acquire the maturity to convert themselves into political
leaders. The same with various coalitions, the same with various human rights
advocates, with the people of Hermanidad Latina, with the people with the
present Council of the IME, these are people who may lead to the next step.
(translation)144
The PRD Senator showed a subtle evaluation of the IME, distinguishing its counselors
from its state housing, and he points out the enduring power of the consulates as a
conservative force.
The Council of the IME cannot be the representation of the Mexicans in the US
in the struggle for their rights, because the Council of the IME is an entity linked
to the Mexican state. But some of its members, yes, they are leaders.
The absence of unity fractures and delegitimizes Mexican organizational strength, in his
view.
144 Author's interview, ex-Senator and Federal Deputy (PRD-Zac), Chamber of Deputies, México DF, 30
October 2006.
186
Here is the problem: that all of them take a step to convert themselves in one
organization that fills in the absence of a Mexican Martin Luther King. We do not
have a leader recognized by all. There is not one (now), but there may be one
group that constitutes itself independently from the Mexican government, from
the state governments, and independently from the consulates, so that it
represents all in the struggle. Because one club or a federation of clubs, well, it's
fine to work for the 3X1 and all of the programs that they manage very well . . .
But above all, Mexican state in the form of the consulates is fundamentally opposed to
the recognition and fulfillment of diaspora participation rights:
. . . but they are never going to be able to participate with the necessary force to
win their rights, because in one way or another, there is the mediation of the
consuls. (translation)145
The significance of the consulates has an important theoretical implication that
challenges a good deal of the existing transnational literature: nations remain largely,
though not entirely, the property of states. The ―globalization from below‖ perspective of
transnationalists implies that national community can thrive by circumventing states
structures, utilizing technological linkages and civic organization to link diaspora actors
and national society. However, they present a weak vision of political community.
Overseas nations that lack access to public venues are likely to remain stunted and
subordinated to government actors in home and resident countries. The alternative route
of creating public associations out of informal spaces is politically problematic:
ultimately, any extraterritorial institution-building of a non-state nature, if it is to
guarantee rights and provide public goods in the long run, will need to connect itself to
the nation-state that animates it.
A clear illustration of the limitations on any sort of diaspora governance without
government can be seen in the 1994 and 2000 mock elections held by Mexican activists
in Chicago and Los Angeles; their votes overwhelmingly supported the left-wing
145 Ibid.
187
opposition PRD party, but they did not count in the election. The exercise functioned as a
political demonstration of protest against the ruling PRI regime. But for electoral
purposes, the voting was meaningless because the Mexican government had not
established any legal authority for diaspora actors to organize elections and vote. The
problem of public legitimacy in overseas politics takes on a specific character in the
special status of state structures as conduit between diaspora and polity. This problem is
crucial to the process of building institutions for overseas voting. It requires that the
analysis focus on state actors preferences as institutionalized in and by state structures.
Conclusion
Mexicans abroad are extremely plural involving a range of high-skill
entrepreneurs, with many millions retaining an active interest in home country politics.
The scale of this population alone puts Mexico in the upper reaches of diaspora nationstates (an emerging global policy category); along with working class migrants, it
includes an upper class of highly-educated elites with potential economic and political
capacities, who have been recognized and targeted by the Mexican state. However, the
promising demographic characteristics and attitudes of Mexican citizens abroad stand in
contrast with the absence of enduring political organization among the diaspora. The
organization that does exist has mainly taken the form of civic and cultural groups, which
lack institutional depth. The one political exception has been the binational activist
network that congealed around the lobbying campaign for the overseas vote. The
exceptional nature of the coalition's success and its subsequent disbanding point to the
hostile institutional environment confronting Mexican diaspora political organization.
Mexico's capable overseas state has acted to shape a restrictive regime for
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overseas voting, which makes electoral participation extremely difficult for all but the
most educated and attentive overseas citizens. Through four mechanisms – campaign
regulation, consular domination of overseas organization, issue framing, and
implementation—the strong capacities and preferences of the Foreign Ministry and the
IFE have shaped a consensus among Mexican political elites that overseas voting is a
political loser for the nation, and therefore a political risk for each party. On the other
hand, overseas voting galvanized Mexican political entrepreneurs in the diaspora, who
for fifteen years articulated a persistent demand, adapted an increasingly coherent
political strategy, and lobbied effectively on behalf of the partial step to overseas
elections in the 2005 law. Yet the Foreign Ministry confirmed the risks of these calls for
the nation, leading legislators to favor an extremely restrictive law.
Despite the absence of full-fledged overseas elections, the development of
transnational politics in Mexico has been stunted, not still-born. The combination of
political pluralization and massive remittance economies has created powerful forces in
support of political participation by emigrant Mexicans, which have been diverted from
electoral participation to other forms. Transnational political entrepreneurship is evident
in civic organization at local and regional levels, in bureaucratic innovation at different
levels, and in a focus upon windows of opportunity in the resident country society.
Political ideas can cross over borders more cheaply than ever, as transnationalists
and globalization enthusiasts like Thomas Friedman point out. But for the new ideas
(such as the notion of the right to vote from abroad) to exert influence, they need to locate
institutional hooks to catch onto, otherwise actors drop them. Why do politicians in
Mexico perceive overseas voting as a costly risk, and not a great growth opportunity as in
189
the Dominican Republic? Why do party leaders differ in their assessment from the rank
and file? Calculations about the organization of diaspora politics depend upon how the
government is organized, I have argued. Through four specific mechanisms, the
capacities and preferences of the overseas state shape and define the political incentives
that guide elite legislator decisions on overseas elections.
By documenting the pivotal role of the two key overseas state units, this analysis
contributes a more complete account of Mexico's response to the overseas voting
question. It challenges conventional explanations of rationalist scholarship and
mainstream political analysts who assign all agency to PRI party leaders. In the first
place, it identifies in full the decisive impact of the diaspora lobby network, which
pushed Mexico against all odds to an intermediate outcome by 2006. Moreover, it
provides a deeper understanding into the structural roots of the containment response.
The absence of competition for migrants' favor between parties rests upon an elite
consensus across their leadership, which is not limited to the PRI's familiar dinosaurs but
also includes the conservative inner circles that rule the PAN and the renegade left-wing
populist candidate of the PRD. Diaspora advocates were seen as a threat to insider power,
within each of the parties, and as a dangerous element in conflict with Mexico's doctrine
of foreign policy. The initiative of the Foreign Ministry to oppose overseas voting,
together with the constant obstacle of its consulates, reinforced arguments about electoral
security that served conservative elites across all three parties concerned with avoiding
uncertainty and loss of control to new migrant actors.
Looking forward, the alliance between state foreign policy elites and party leaders
will have consequences, especially given the pace of diaspora learning and its multiple
190
points of political entry. The restrictive voting institution has blocked transnational
entrepreneurs from access to Mexico's electoral politics, a fact likely to accelerate the
erosion of party orientations of concerned Mexican diaspora citizens along with the
possibility of their re-orientation to the country of residence.
Chapter 5
Overseas voting in Asia and Africa
Remittances intensify diaspora politics, putting overseas voting on the national agenda in
democratic countries. Chapter two documented the global diffusion of overseas practices
in terms of its historical practice and recent popularity, pointing out the strong association
between political openness and remittances with open overseas voting. Investigating the
puzzle of variance in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, case study research found that
the nature and strength of state structures is crucial to whether labor export countries will
adopt open overseas voting or not. In developing democracies with sizable remittancesending communities and weak state structures, transnational political entrepreneurs are
more easily able to institute open overseas voting. If the state structures are strong,
however, then open voting is unlikely.
This chapter extends the state-diaspora analysis in three sets of paired cases in the
regions of East Asia, South Asia, and West Africa. The chapter first relates the research
question to the six cases investigated here and then elaborates my argument in the form of
four key mechanisms. In the second section, it discusses case selection and offers a
comparative overview of the regional pairs and all six cases together. It then presents the
mini-case studies.
What makes similar cases from the same region adopt different responses on
overseas voting? To explain persistent variance, my thesis is two-fold: i) political
openness and remittances are sufficient to put open voting on the national agenda; ii)
however, countries will implement open overseas voting only if political entrepreneurs
are not inhibited by overseas state structures, namely strongly institutionalized foreign
ministries and electoral bureaucracies committed to doctrines of nationalism and
territorial organization. This chapter refers to countries lacking such structures as weak
191
192
states; in these countries, overseas elections can be organized immediately. The extension
cases test the hypotheses generated thus far, with particular attention to the mechanisms
that link theoretical factors to their expected effects.
I
The overseas state at work
Among East Asia‘s recent democracies, why does the Philippines adopt open
voting, while South Korea has rebuffed diaspora participation demands until recent signs
of change? In South Asia‘s first post-colonial nations and great multi-ethnic states of
strategic scale, why do we find an even more clear-cut distinction between India‘s denial
and Indonesia‘s liberal adoption? In Western Africa, why does Senegal steadily expand
overseas voting while Ghana stops short?
The studies in this chapter test the author‘s ―overseas state‖ hypothesis in relation
to two alternatives: a rationalist domestic politics argument focusing on elite party
decision-making and a sociological perspective that applies an ideographic methodology
and emphasizes the configuration of the diaspora‘s experience and demography within
national political history. In the rationalist view, the key actors are national legislators
voting on the basis of their party‘s interest—a view that offers leverage within a narrow
timeframe but lacks predictive power in explaining outcomes linked to processes that
extend one electoral cycle. The sociological view represents, in effect, a null hypothesis
that overseas state structure does not explain the outcomes, that there is no common
causal explanation; in this view, outcomes are explained by the interaction of diaspora
capacities, the particular meaning of emigration within the polity and the
transnationalization of shared national experience over time.
Thus, three main rival views are associated with respective sets of alternative
193
explanatory factors: overseas state structure (bureaucratic capacity and disposition in the
foreign ministry and electoral commission); domestic politics (party structure, electoral
formulae and other incentive structures in the domestic arena); and diaspora demography
and an idiosyncratic historical factor (socioeconomic and organizational characteristics,
transnational memory and experience of emigration). Table 5.0 presents the author‘s
argument in graphic form, presenting a roadmap of the chapter that classifies the cases
across the range of OV outcomes in terms of the key factors in the argument.
Table 5.0
Overseas state structures
Capacities
Values
State
sovereignty
Strong
Weak
(professionalized & autonomous)
(personalized & dependent)
No OV
non-determinate
(Mexico, India)
(Ghana)
&
Preferences
Individual
Rights
Gradual/Partial openness
(South Korea)
Open OV
(DR, Senegal,
Philippines, Indonesia)
While the rationalist view is parsimonious, it is insufficient and too often in
conflict with the facts, I contend. The interests of political elites are unclear at best,
shifting quickly in South Korea and Mexico and provoking costly miscalculations, as we
will see in Ghana. Guiding elite re-calculations in these cases are the institutional factors
associated with the overseas state in four mechanisms, which occur in rough sequence
from first surfacing of a diaspora voting claim.
194
Fundraising controls: within the domestic arena, strong electoral commissions
that uphold bans or domestic normative prohibitions on foreign fundraising deter
partisan outreach and overseas party-building.
Diaspora organization: in diaspora cities, strong foreign ministries staffed by a
professional foreign service present a pre-existing venue for non-partisan
diaspora organization in the consular infrastructure, driving transnational
entrepreneurship to state and civic sectors. Strong state capacities also raise
concerns about government manipulation of overseas voting in favor of the
incumbent party, making opposition leaders more risk averse in deciding whether
to support OV or not.
Issue framing: in the legislature, the foreign ministry and electoral commission
frame the domestic politics of the overseas voting issue when they weigh in with
the media and legislators about the costs, logistics and consequences for external
relations with resident countries; foreign conflict and hostile states are inimical to
overseas voting; in states founded on principles of nationalism and territorial
organization,146 bureaucratic actors make overseas voting politically toxic when
they invoke potential risks to state interests.
Implementation: abroad, strong overseas state structures disposed to minimize
risks to state and ruling party can obstruct expansive implementation of diaspora
voting, seen concretely in the coordination between electoral commission and
foreign ministry.
146 Indicators of this sort of ―state nationalism‖ include strong adherence to territorial organization,
national jurisdiction and non-intervention in the operational plans of the foreign ministry and the
electoral bureaucracy.
195
In each of these four regards, weak states in which transnational electoral organization is
unimpeded by territorial-nationalist doctrines are more conducive to the growth and
institutionalization of open overseas voting.
The mechanisms of overseas state intermediation involve specific capacities
matched to particular bureaucratic norms and preferences. As the extension cases will
show, this more complex argument is better suited to the full complexity of variant
outcomes. Nevertheless, two simple points merit mention. Necessary conditions for
today‘s transnational politics as theorized are a minimum level of domestic political
openness and a remittance-sending overseas population. Secondly, overseas state factors
shape incentives for transnational political entrepreneurship. Self-interested calculations
by domestic political bosses, transnational agents and diaspora advocates play out in a
structural context that is more or less conducive to expansive overseas voting. Actors
weigh the uncertainty and costs against the force of rights claims and their anticipated
future benefits, each interpreted according to his or her position in the government, the
parties, or civil society. Especially in recent democratizers, calculations about politicalinstitutional pathways are fraught with uncertainty amidst tenuous rules of the game.
Thus the overseas state argument incorporates two crucial strategic propositions:
A necessary condition of open overseas voting is a ruling party that wants it.
When a party leader with a potential veto perceives uncertainty (namely risks of
opposition cheating or non-acceptance), he or she will not support open OV.
The rationalist perspective is necessary in pointing out essential strategic calculations
and interactions at work, but insufficient to explain variance across cases. Its weakness
lies in taking actors‘ interests as given and self-evident rather than problematizing these
196
interests and probing their structural and ideological sources. What makes ruling parties
want OV, and what are the conditions required for cross-party consensus? It is puzzling
why entrepreneurs in one remittance-dependent democracy regard OV as risky and
dangerous, while elites in a comparable nearby country accept OV as an automatic
opportunity space to be exploited. Anomalies across similar cases and puzzling instances
of apparently significant miscalculation suggest that interests are not that obvious and call
for qualitative research into the dynamics of interest formation and calculation.
The overseas state argument that develops is thus a somewhat friendly critique of the
rationalist perspective. As such, it is also naturally better equipped to assess the diaspora
politics phenomenon than the sociological view. Contrary to the latter‘s primary focus
upon diaspora actors, the existence of millions of overseas nationals does not necessarily
signify the emergence of a new political actor. One may emerge, but there is not an
automatic relationship. The unity and political influence of transnational voting advocates
is an empirical variable. The ensuing case analyses will investigate whether purely
internal or transnational factors are most significant in structuring incentives.
II
Case selection & comparative overview
The extension cases fall within the dissertation‘s scope of developing democracies
with significant remittance-sending populations overseas. Case selection controls for
region while maximizing variance on the key dependent and independent variables. Thus,
each set of paired cases share the same region but present a contrasting overseas voting
outcome. Otherwise, the most important difference lies in the institutional characteristics
of the specified state units.
197
In East Asia, Philippines and South Korea present a paired comparison that is
directly analogous to the dissertation‘s core Mexico-Dominican Republic pair. Both are
middle-income developing countries with highly visible overseas populations that contain
important concentrations in the U.S. In both pairs, the insular weak-state case
(Dominican Republic, Philippines) has experienced open overseas voting, while the
hierarchically organized and more industrialized cases with a stronger state (Mexico,
South Korea) have resisted increasing diaspora mobilization, despite increasing political
competition and party alternation in power.
Both East Asia cases experienced democratization in the 1980s, too, though they
also differ in some basic ways. Philippines has high levels of inequality and poverty,
whereas South Korea has joined the OECD countries with its greater income distribution
and higher per capita income. In terms of overseas voting, Philippines presents a case of
expansive overseas voting driven by transnational NGO networks rather than political
parties. By contrast, in South Korea, diaspora networks have encountered a territorially
defined national state that initially rejected the constitutionality of overseas voting but
presently shows signs of a wholesale shift in the elite consensus, driving Korean courts
and parties to establish the legal basis for overseas voting. Lastly, prominence of national
security concerns in South Korea together with its declining birth rates present unique
(and contradictory) factors of potential importance.
In South Asia, India and Indonesia present a pair of two of the world‘s four largest
nation-states, both formed out of tremendous internal diversity in the middle of the 20th
century and built around the principle of secular nationalism. India has rejected overseas
voting to date, resisting the recent demands for electoral participation rights of its more
198
numerous diaspora, despite a significantly longer experience of multiparty open elections.
At first glimpse, its overseas voting profile resembles an extreme version of Mexico, with
a strong internal and external state hierarchy setting the bounds for party-diaspora
relations. Indonesia, by contrast, has recently implemented open overseas voting in recent
elections, building upon early foundations established under the authoritarian regime and
integrating a relatively less prominent diaspora population in national elections since
2004.
The cases of Senegal and Ghana show the overseas voting issue playing out in
Western Africa states amidst a context of ―brain drain‖ and recent democratization in two
small-medium size countries. Cross-border migration is deeply ingrained in the societies
of western Africa, for which the historical legacies of diaspora are profound but part of
the region‘s deep structure and historical memory147; in the region‘s contemporary
politics, common characteristics are weak nation-states with significant internal ethnic
divisions that have nevertheless acted to institutionalize a managed migration region in
forming the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 1975. The
experiences of Senegal and Ghana in recent decades have been marked by traumatic
effects of neoliberal economic policies, including renewed labor export along shifting
lines and greater global dispersion, along with competitive multi-party elections and
peaceful transitions in power to opposition-led regimes.
Contrary to initial evidence of reversion from overseas voting, research shows
Senegal to be a steady expander of open overseas voting, with a volume of activity
remarkable in proportion to the country‘s relatively small scale and low income. Senegal,
147 Polgreen, Lydia. 2005. Ghana‘s uneasy embrace of slavery‘s diaspora. New York Times, 27 December.
199
with highly personalistic politics and increasingly pluralist forms of clientelism, presents
a paradigmatic case of a weak state with open overseas elections. In comparison, Ghana
initially shows a remarkable resemblance to Senegal in the timing of democratization, its
personalistic politics, and the great dispersion of its diaspora, yet it has rejected overseas
voting to date. Overseas voting legislation passed in 2006 sparked major political
controversy in Ghana, and the opposition party blocked implementation of overseas
voting in the 2008 Presidential election. Ghana has institutionalized a more traditional
foreign policy doctrine based upon nationalism and the pursuit of foreign development
assistance. The no voting outcome is puzzling, and it is unclear whether Ghana‘s
marginalized Foreign Ministry can account for the outcome. The extension case
investigates the transnational and domestic politics to locate the main sources of this
opposition.
As Table 5.1 shows, the expatriate populations range from roughly 2% to 10% of
each national population. All received over $1 billion U.S. in remittances in 2007. The
cases fall into two clusters in the magnitude of remittance dependency, based on
aggregate GDP differentials between the larger more industrialized countries and the
more peripheral economies. Moreover, all of the cases in this chapter except for India
moved to competitive multi-party elections in the late 1980s or early 1990s; including
India, all six first experienced ruling party changes in the 1990s. Similar high levels of
political openness are evident in their Polity scores at the top end of the twenty one-point
range.
200
Table 5.1
Developing democracies with transnational politics in three regions
Demographics
Expats,
mill.
Economics
Democracy
Pop.,
mill.
Remittances,
$bill.
GDP,
per
capita
Remit.
% of
GDP
Polity
-10 lo
10 hi
Regime
onset
(# yrs)
OV
as of
2008
Philippines
8.7
88
$11.6
low
12.9
8
1987 (21)
Yes
South Korea
3.0
48
1.1
high
0.1
8
1987 (21)
No
25.0
1,150
27.0
low-mid
2.4
9
1950 (48)
No
Indonesia
6.0
230
6.5
low-mid
1.3
8
1999 (9)
Yes
Senegal
1.0
13
1.0
low
8.5
8
1993 (15)
Yes
Ghana
2.0
23
1.2
low
10.0
8
1992 (16)
No
India
Sources: UN, World Bank, Polity IV
In the individual mini-case studies that follow, the analysis uses evidence obtained
from government documents and secondary sources. It describes the overseas voting
outcome along with the country‘s experience with labor emigration and democratization.
In considering the domestic politics and state structures, essential aspects reviewed
include electoral history, recent status and trends of the country‘s political openness, the
number and types of political parties, the relevant government institutions, and any
idiosyncrasies that may be significant. After a chronology summarizing key turning
points and events, each case study analyzes the outcomes in terms of state-diaspora
relations, investigating the interactions of political actors and structures including
political parties, civic organizations and state actors. It then assesses the relative causal
significance of the main domestic and transnational factors at work.
Philippines: Policy-bred transnational coalitions & open OV in a weak state
The Philippines has put in place an expansive overseas voting institution in recent
years. As anticipated in the 1987 Constitution and following passage of the Overseas
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Absentee Voting Act in 2003, the Philippines first implemented overseas voting in the
2004 Presidential election. More than 250,000 overseas Filipinos voted in over 100
embassies, consulates and other official overseas voting sites with participation among
expatriates in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions (COAV, 175). Philippines again
implemented overseas voting in the interim legislative elections of 2007, boosting
registration to 487,000 overseas voters but resulting in a disappointing participation rate
of only 20%. Efforts to clarify the rules and expand outreach to overseas citizens led to
mixed participation results from the 2007 interim election, with growth in registration to
approximately 450,000 but only 20% turnout (112,000) due to a generalized let-down
linked in part to it being a mid-term election.
5.2
Philippines OV Chronology
1946
Independence: U.S. colonial administration (1898-1942), Japan wartime occupation (1942-45)
1972 - 1986 Martial law under President Marcos
1974
1977
1980
1982
Labor Code for Overseas Workers
Overseas Workers Welfare Administration established
Commission on Overseas Filipinos established by Presidential directive
Philippines Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) by executive order
1986
1987
Anti-Marcos People Power movement; Opposition leader Corazon Aquino elected President
Constitution establishes workers' rights to organize trade unions
1992
Election of Fidel Ramos to Presidency (1992-1998)
1995
Act on Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos signed by President Fidel Ramos
Inception of June 7 Migrant Day celebration and Month of Overseas Filipinos (Dec.)
1998
2001
Election of Joseph Estrada
Resignation of Estrada, assumption of Macapagal-Arroyo
2001
Overseas worker demonstrations in Hong Kong on worker protections and wages
2003
Overseas Absentee Voting Law passed
Citizenship Retention and Re-acquisition Act passed
2004
2007
2010
Implementation of overseas voting; Re-election of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
Second implementation in interim elections
2nd Presidential election with overseas voting
202
Philippines is a world leader in labor export, with an overseas population
estimated to be 8.7 million, equivalent to 10% of the total national population of 88
million.148 The total amount of remittances received in 2004 of $11.6 billion was
exceeded only in India, Mexico and France; in the Philippines, they composed 12.9% of
national production, indicating a high remittance dependency. Politically, the Philippines'
high levels of political openness have been crucial to overseas voting, especially in recent
decades. In 1987, the People Power movement instituted a new Constitution that restored
electoral democracy following the fall of authoritarian rule under Ferdinand Marcos
(1972-1986). The 1987 Constitution guaranteed worker rights to form trade unions, and
its suffrage article established the constitutional basis for overseas voting:
The Congress shall provide a system for securing the secrecy and sanctity of the ballot as
well as a system for absentee voting by qualified Filipinos abroad (Art. V, Section 2).149
Nevertheless, high political openness scores have not coincided with stable
governance in the Philippines; instead, weak institutions, widespread poverty and
extreme concentration of wealth have sustained oligarchic patterns of politics. The
government is a unitary state with incomplete capacities, which opens large spaces for
strong private actors including family-based industrial monopolies, a powerful national
Catholic church, and guerilla groups. A recent World Bank governance analysis rated
government effectiveness in the Philippines in the middle of all countries, at -0.01 on a
five-point scale from -2.5 to 2.5 (Kaufmann et al 2007, 87).
Filipino labor export began in earnest in the 1970s amidst a context of political
repression and economic underperformance. Originally focused on Asian destinations,
148 Philippine Overseas Employment Administration. 2007 Overseas Employment Statistics, p. 42.
http://www.poea.gov.ph/stats/stats2007.pdf (14 April 2009).
149 1987 Constitution of the Philippines. http://www.gov.ph/aboutphil/a5.asp (14 April 2009).
203
outflows accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s with a greater dispersion, as seen in the
increase in remittances from under $1.0 billion in 1985 (1.9% of GDP ) to $13.6 billion in
2005 (or 13.4% of GDP). Diversity across region, skill, gender and duration mark the
Filipino diaspora as a complex field. Geographically, major undocumented populations
work in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states, as well as Hong Kong, Singapore,
and Taiwan. Of registered Filipino migrants, the large majority resides in the U.S. (68%),
as well as Canada (14%), Japan and Australia (6% each).
One major distinction of the Philippines' labor export is the weak state's active
and early role in organizing and facilitating emigration. The first oil boom of 1973 and
the ensuing need for workers in the Middle East generated a rapid, active response of the
Philippines government (Asis 2006, 34). As a response, the 1974 Labor Code established
guidelines for the regulation of labor export, and an ensuing Presidential directive set up
the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) to provide insurance and welfare
services. This led to the creation of the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency
(POEA) in 1982 to promote and monitor the work of Filipino workers abroad. As early as
1980, the Philippines had set up a National Commission for Overseas Filipinos, an
organization that has focused on permanent migrants.
In the 1980s, labor export became a permanent feature of the national economic
strategy, and attention shifted to protecting workers. Today, the Department of Foreign
Affairs identifies the obligation to protect Filipino workers as one of three pillars of the
country‘s foreign policy, along with national security and international economic policy.
After the termination of authoritarian rule, the new regime reorganized the POEA in 1987
with an emphasis on protection of overseas Filipino workers' rights. Along the same lines,
204
but in more substantial fashion, the 1995 Act for Overseas Filipino Workers consolidated
the state's formal commitment to protect Filipino nationals in contracting and undertaking
overseas jobs (Rodriguez 2002, 347-8). State rhetoric has evolved from the 1973
―balikbayan‖ (national returnee) program that emphasized overseas contract work to a
more positive celebration of Filipino migrants as national heroes. In 1995, it designated
June 7th as the Day of the Migrant Worker and December as the official month of the
Overseas Filipino days a year to celebrate diaspora contributions (Asis, 37).
State-diaspora relations in the Philippines
Despite its early start in developing an active state policy on labor export, the
Philippines' implementation of overseas worker protections has been complicated by the
country's weak institutions and a political bias in favor of elite corporate interests, which
has spurred a response by civil society activists. From the outset, Philippines policy
envisioned a major enabling role for private enterprise, which today comprises over 1,000
licensed recruitment agencies. The pro-business orientation of state policy has led to the
active involvement of Filipino civil society in efforts to protect overseas Filipino workers
and communities.
In response to the pro-business regime, NGOs and the Catholic Church have
sustained the importance of protecting Filipino migrants, ensuring a space for workers'
rights in the national agenda. In particular, transnational Filipino NGOs have had a
significant impact not only internationally but also on the domestic politics of the country
(Asis, 41-42). Their criticism of the government for insufficient efforts to protect the
human rights of overseas workers was vital in spurring the 1995 Act. Utilizing their
transnational presence, the overseas workers‘ advocates have also advanced programs on
205
worker savings and community development. Basic welfare functions have become
institutionalized element in state policy, with the OWWA organized to provide health and
disability insurance, education and other welfare services for overseas workers and their
families. The ongoing tension and struggle between labor advocates and private elites
over emigration policy is a major fault line for Filipino diaspora politics.
The obligation to protect overseas Filipino workers has major political resonance
abroad and at home, and it has driven the overseas voting agenda in recent years. Filipino
NGOs have played the pivotal role in prodding the state forward not only on worker
protection reforms but also on overseas voting.150 2001 to 2002 saw a strong longdistance lobbying effort, as overseas Filipino activists from Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia
led the charge with support globally including Europe and North America (see photo in
Appendix II).151 One group called the International Coalition for Overseas Filipino
Voting Rights was based in Saudi Arabia and exerted a strong presence on-line.
Coordinating the effort out of Manila was the Coalition for Migrant Advocacy. The
Filipino legislature passed the Overseas Absentee Voting Act in 2002, which led to a twoyear period of organization and lobbying focused on implementation. The Philippines
Commission on Election (COMELEC) established its Committee for Overseas Absentee
Voting (COAV), which organized the 2004 overseas voting in the national election.
COAV cooperated with the Department of Foreign Affairs in an effective manner.
150 David, Randy. 2002. The absentee voting law/ The Philippine Daily Inquirer, Manila, 25 August.
http://www.philsol.nl/of/02/AV-opinions-sep02.htm (14 April 2009).
151 The next page shows a photo of organized Filipina migrant workers rallying in Hong Kong in 2001.
The rally, which protested regressive changes in local Hong Kong laws regarding wages and rules for
overstays, was organized by the Asian Migrant Theatre Company in association with the Coalition for
Migrants' Rights. The same coalition was instrumental in lobbying for the 2003 OAV act and for
making Hong Kong the largest site of OV registration with over 90,000 voters enrolled in the new
process for the 2004 election.
http://www.december18.net/web/general/page.php?pageID=70&menuID=36&lang=EN (14 April
2009).
206
F i l i p i n a m i g r a n t s r a l l y i n H o n g K o n g , I n t e r n a t i o n a l L a b o r D a y, M a y 1 , 2 0 0 1
Source: author's own photograph.
207
Coordination between the DFA and the COMELEC to implement overseas voting
has shown a measure of technical effectiveness and enabled a gradual but steady
expansion in overseas participation, although initial turnout expectations proved
exaggerated, with COAV falling well short of its ambitious registration goal of 900,000.
Together the two agencies spent roughly 15 million US dollars in the 2003-04 electoral
cycle – approximately $15 per registrant and $25 per overseas voter (COAV, 198). The
government coordinated voting in 81 consulates in 2004 and then expanded further in
2007. The initial experiences led administrators at Commission on Elections to push for
amendments to the law to make it work better; accordingly, the revised Act authorizes
coordination between the COMELEC and the Department of Foreign Affairs Secretariat
for overseas voting and designates the Committee for Overseas Absentee Voting as the
lead implementing agency, establishing the classifications of ―posts‖ as consulates or
embassies with jurisdiction to direct the counting of votes. Regarding the method of
voting, the revised law also authorizes the COAV Committee in consultation with the
DFA Secretariat to determine for each country whether postal or direct voting will be the
method. The law directs the Committee in determining the voting method to take into
consideration the number of registered overseas Filipino voters, the accessibility of
consulates, and the efficiency of the host country mailing system.
More recently, activities to expand OV have continued. Interestingly, low initial
overseas turnout has not caused abandonment of overseas voting in the Philippines, but
has instead led to renewed efforts to make mass participation more likely. With the
support of COMELEC, NGO groups and legislators, efforts to broaden the accessibility
of the overseas franchise are underway in House and Senate amendments to the 2003 OV
208
law, including clauses that would enable choice of means for voting, remove the ―intent
to return‖ affidavit now required for all voters, and ease re-registration procedures.152
The Philippines case shows the effects of overseas state structures in shaping
political incentives as a result of mechanisms of diaspora organization, issue framing and
implementation.153 The Philippines overseas state is pliant and moderately effective,
disposed to addressing diaspora demands and neither an obstacle nor an initiator of the
organizations that articulated and campaigned for overseas voting demands. Decades of
national policy development on behalf of overseas Filipino workers spurred the
organization of transnational civic networks and established a discursive basis for their
overseas voting demands. Within the context of democratic consolidation, when overseas
voting demands arrived, Macapagal-Arroyo sought to solidify her profile as a President
who strongly supported overseas Filipinos.
These mechanisms explain why the ruling party responded favorably. Unlike in
Mexico, the government lacks the protocol and means to control Filipino transnational
organization. The foreign ministry did not frame the overseas voting issue in terms of
territorial sovereignty and risks to state interests, nor did the electoral commission
emphasize the difficulties and costs of implementation. Empowered by a more favorable
balance of capacities, the transnational NGO coalition voiced forceful demands for
overseas voting, and the ruling party and the bureaucracy have responded favorably to the
law by acting to expand overseas access, as seen in their introduction of mixed methods
152 Comments on H.B. Nos. 2812, 2046 and 32091 by Atty. Henry S. Rojas, Legal Counsel, Center for
Migrant Advocacy, Manila, Philippines. Available online at: http://www.pinoyabroad.net/lungga/index.shtml.
153 Regarding overseas fundraising, the extent to which transnational money politics and consular
patronage have driven the overseas voting issue remains uncertain and requires further qualitative
research.
209
to ensure broader diaspora participation (Navarro 2007, 181).
South Korea: Post-territorial norms, rights claims turn a strong state slowly
South Korea is an interesting East Asian case due to its significant overseas
population of approximately 3 million Korean nationals and as a recent democratizer that
is also a wealthy, industrialized OECD member. Migrant remittances make up just 0.1%
of national income, but the political remittances thesis (p.1.) identifies the existence of
remittance-sending overseas nationals (and not the level of remittance dependency) as a
sufficient condition for the emergence of the OV issue in democracies. South Korea‘s
demography and its political and economic development therefore suggest that an open
voting institution would be in place. However, after a decade of increasing contention on
the topic, South Korea has yet to implement overseas voting, not passing an overseas law
until February of 2009. The Korean case combines strongly institutionalized territorial
structures exhibited in the Mexico case with a highly organized set of civic and business
organizations dedicated to overseas Koreans.
5.3
South Korea Chronology
1953
1960s
1972
South Korea established with Korean War armistice
Ad hoc voting for overseas South Korea‘s soldiers in Vietnam organized
President Park Chung-Hee banned growing diaspora component from voting
1987
1992
1997
Constitutional referendum affirms Sixth Republic, peaceful transition from military rule
First civilian President elected since 1963: Kim Young Sam assumes office in 1993
Opposition party candidate Kim Dae Jung elected President, defeating NKP (DLP)
1997
Opposition party introduces bill for overseas voting
National Congress for New Politics, predecessor of Millennium Democratic Party (MDP)
2003
Left-liberal candidate Roh of MDP elected President
Overseas Korean associations call for overseas voting
Seoul District Court upheld state ban on overseas Koreans from voting
Grand National Party introduces expansive OV legislation in national legislature
Constitutional Court rules OV ban unconstitutional, law required for overseas Koreans.
Conservative Grand National Party candidate Lee Myung-bak elected President
2004
2007
2009
National Assembly passes Overseas Voting Act, enfranchising 1.4 million overseas Koreans
210
Based on conservative estimates of its diaspora population, South Korea ranked
among the top 30 labor export democratizing countries. The Foreign Ministry data
indicate that as of 2007 over 3 million South Korean nationals reside abroad. South
Korea‘s domestic population was 48.3 million in 2005. While recent data show
remittances to be just 0.1% of GDP, the overseas population is important to this mid-sized
nation due to its high skill segments abroad and broad dispersion. South Korea‘s overseas
population is significantly dispersed, with the largest portion in North America (over 1
million in the U.S., including over 100,000 students in U.S. universities) as well as
significant contingents in the major states of East Asia and Europe. Korea‘s diaspora
features a vibrant organizational profile, with civic and state-linked organizations
cementing a set of structured overseas networks in a transnational extension of its welldocumented corporate polity (Evans 1995, 124-6, 201-3).
The OV issue emerged in South Korea in the late 1990s as a result of demands
made by overseas Korean diaspora organizational leaders and activists. Partisan and legal
contention grew as organized groups of overseas Koreans presented voting rights
demands to the President and twice sued the state for violating their constitutional rights
to democratic participation, with opposition parties of left and right adopting prooverseas voting positions at different times.154 The project initially moved forward with a
bill launched by the left-wing opposition Millennium Democratic Party, and a group of
Japanese-Koreans filed suit against South Korea for violation of their political rights and
invoked international norms among OECD to attempt to shame the government into
154 The Korea Times. 2003. Overseas Koreans Ask Roh to Pay More Attention to Europe. 27 February.
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opening OV. But a Seoul District Court upheld the status quo of the state ban on overseas
voting in a 2003 decision.155 In that year, the MDP took control of the Presidency, and the
conservative opposition party took over possession as leading advocate of overseas
voting, offering an expansive bill to enable open overseas voting for nearly 3 million
overseas voters. The left-wing government and the Foreign Ministry upheld the
traditional ban on overseas voting, expressing nation-territorial argumentation as recently
as 2006.156 Addressing 254 leaders of Korean communities in 53 foreign countries
convened in Seoul at the World Korean Community Leaders' Convention, Lee Joon-gyu,
director of the ministry's consular affairs bureau, clearly indicated the ministry‘s position
against overseas voting rights. "(Such a law) would have a bad impact on their lives in
foreign countries, since it would provoke nationalism," said Lee. With no ministry
backing for their proposals, the community leaders conveyed their views instead to
President Roh that afternoon; in coming months, the overseas Korean advocates would
expand their campaign to the opposition party, legal challenges and media airwaves.
In 2007, the Supreme Constitutional Court revisited the topic, but this time it
ruled against the government‘s ban on overseas voting and required the legislature to act
on voting legislation. Also in 2007, Korean-American organizations organized an
overseas letter-writing campaign advocating the overseas voting rights,157 and the
Alliance for Suffrage for Overseas Koreans set up an office in Seoul with links to major
online Korean websites for overseas Koreans and major opposition parties. That same
year, victory in the Presidential election by the conservative GNP party placed a pro-OV
155 Joo-hee, Lee. 2003. Court rules overseas Koreans cannot vote. Korea Herald, 14 September, via LexisNexis.
156 Chung-un, Cho. 2006. Government rejects suffrage calls from overseas Koreans. Korea Herald, 8
June.
157 Hyo-lim, Ahn. 2007. Overseas Koreans lobby for suffrage. Korea Herald, 17 April.
212
force at the head of the government.
The Grand National Party has stepped up overseas organization significantly in
recent years, though Korean rules restrict overseas fundraising. In the 2007 election, it
sought to organize return travel for overseas voters and held meetings and fundraisers
with Korean-American organizations in New York and Los Angeles, while its candidate
spoke out in favor of overseas voting.158 Since taking office, it has announced new
programs for overseas Koreans. GNP outreach is based on the understanding that the
overseas Koreans are more conservative and likely to support it. Overseas fundraising has
been less central as a transnational mechanism supporting OV expansion in South Korea,
for two reasons. First, Korea‘s large national income provides a domestic base for party
finance with multiple streams including public funding and private domestic
contributions. Secondly, amendments to the Political Funds Act passed in March 2004
prohibited donations from foreigners to Korean political parties (Transparency
International 2006, 47). Donations by overseas Korean nationals are permissible, but they
must be registered and disclosed according to the same strict criteria governing domestic
donations.
Early in 2009, South Korea‘s National Assembly passed major voting legislation,
which will authorize open overseas voting with an expansive format as soon as 2012.
Conforming with the Constitutional Court‘s directive to rewrite electoral law, the
Assembly bill extends voting rights to 2.4 million overseas Korean nationals, including
not only those who are employed in overseas government offices or residing abroad on a
158 Korea Times. 2005. GNP Head Promises Voting Rights for Ethnic Koreans. 22 February, via LexisNexis.
Hyun-kyung, Kang. 2007. Lee Urges Absentee Vote for Overseas Citizens. Korea Times, 3 September
http://gopkorea.blogs.com/ (27 February 2010).
213
temporary basis, but also those who are permanent residents of foreign countries.159 The
voting rights apply to Presidential and national legislative elections, and the bill specified
the voting method as direct voting in overseas government offices such as consulates and
embassies. Korea‘s National Election Commission has begun planning for first
implementation in 2012, laying out a budget of $7.8 million (US) based on its count of
1.03 million eligible voters out among 2.8 million overseas Koreans and an assumption
that 50 percent of them will register for absentee ballots.160 According to news stories of
diaspora polls, analysts of Korean politics anticipate the potential for decisive
interventions by this newly enfranchised overseas bloc, given its significant scale and
survey evidence indicating strong interest in voting among overseas nationals (Ha, 2009).
But if other countries‘ experiences count, overseas participation is likely to begin below
target and steadily increase.
South Korea illustrates a mixed outcome and a different kind of diaspora politics,
with political remittances in the absence of remittance dependency acting to break up the
restrictive consensus associated with a strong state. Driving the politics of overseas
voting in South Korea are persistent diaspora rights claims in a context of more deeply
institutionalized rule of law and renewed party interest. South Korea shows the complex
but crucial mechanisms of overseas state intermediation in the way the government
reframes the issue. Clearly a strong state founded on principles of territorial organization,
South Korea maintains a persistent ban on OV but then shows the beginning of moves to
change. Changing norms and preferences within the Korean state—namely the desire to
159 Yonhap. 2008. South Korean parliament passes bill to allow voting by expatriates. Seoul: 5 February.
160 Choson Ilbo. 2008. Overseas South Koreans may vote starting in 2012 general election. Seoul, 19
October. Yonhap. 2008. Election watchdog to submit bill granting suffrage for overseas Koreans. 10
September.
214
resemble OECD countries and the diminished concern about overseas risks to national
security—have provided an opening for diaspora demands, as reflected in the successful
legal campaigns that resulted in the favorable Constitutional Court decision. The South
Korea case remains a mixed outcome since it has yet to implement OV. A serious delay is
imaginable only if consensus in the bureaucracy erodes and gives rise to stories of risk
with the potential to activate a veto-wielding opposition coalition. Given the South
Korean state‘s slow but steady institutionalization of liberal norms, a more likely
trajectory to anticipate is one of implementation with heavy controls that expands
overseas participation gradually.
India: Elite transnationalism and state-led participation
India has a highly restrictive form of overseas voting, limiting it to legislative
elections only and, more importantly, by eligibility in terms of overseas employment
class, specifically confining the right to military personnel and government officers (Ellis
et al, 2007). The global survey in IDEA's Handbook indicates that it first implemented
the practice in 2004, though the national Election Commission of India lists no results for
overseas voting in its general election statistics. India has undergone major economic and
political openings since 1991, sparking ferment in state-diaspora relations, however it has
not passed an overseas voting law. Rather, the matter remains governed entirely by its
founding constitution and electoral law of 1950, which requires individual registrants to
reside in their ordinary constituency in India, although it specifies exceptions in cases of
state service obligations (Manual of Election Law, 59). Thus India presently defines a
second restrictive outcome: no law, highly restrictive overseas voting.
In terms of potential diaspora voting, India is anomalous for its scale and for the
215
diversity of its diaspora. It is a labor export democracy with many decades of political
openness and institutionalized multi-party electoral competition; its massive diaspora is
geographically dispersed, socioeconomically segmented and closely linked to the home
country; its recent geopolitical emergence extends a tradition of high-profile foreign
policy activism as leader of the non-aligned movement and a major regional power. In
2004: India's population was 1.08 billion; its estimated 20 to 25 million diaspora
population made up roughly 2% of the population and sent back $19.8 billion in
economic remittances (2.9% of GDP); Polity2 measures scored its political openness
level a 9 (on a scale of -10 to 10), indicating a high degree of relative competition and
rights, and dated the age of its present regime at 54 years.
India's mixed characteristics make it an interesting case. Based on political
openness and diaspora remittances, we would expect it to have an overseas voting law
and an open institution. Its large diaspora population suggests that it should have an open
voting law but not an open institution, and its extremely large domestic population
suggests that both outcomes are likely to be negative. Looking at the values of individual
variables in isolation obscures the locus and nature of causal effects. We need to consider
how the diversity of the diaspora interacts with the main features of the domestic polity
including its powerful parties and state ministries.
216
5.4
India OV Chronology
1947
1950
Independence from England
Constitution and Representation of the People Act
1991
Economic liberalization
1998
2000
Opposition electoral win, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party rules through 2004
High Level Committee Report on the Indian Diaspora
2001
2002
2003
NRI voting issue advocated by Minister of State for External Affairs
Report and recommendations of High Level Committee
Annual Pravasi Bhartiya Divas (PBD) commence
Passage of Citizenship Amendment Act expanding access to PIOs
2004
Initial OV implementation along extremely restrictive format (state employees only)
2006
Prime Minister M. Singh (INC) advocates OV for NRIs at PBD assembly Hyderabad
Progress on restrictive OV bill (requiring voting in home district)
Parliamentary committee report calling for more study and comprehensive bill
Issuance of OCI citizenship for PIOs
Negotiations with Europe and Gulf states for protections, overseas citizenship status
2007
2009
Introduction of full-scale NRI voting bill including National Commission for NRIs
PBD in Chennai theme: Overseas Indians & India's emergence as a global power
The Indian diaspora began to take shape in the 19th century with the first of three
distinct emigration waves and so predates the modern Indian state; it is distinctive for its
scale, global dispersion and socioeconomic diversity. In a seminal analysis, Robin Cohen
classifies India as the prototypical labor diaspora (1995, 80); on the other hand, Kapur
identifies the elite component of overseas Indians in the U.K. and the U.S. in arguing that
diaspora pressures played an instrumental role as intellectual catalyst in prompting the
Congress regime to adopt economic liberalization in 1991 (2003, 383-4). Both analyses
are relevant: active transnational links bond India to both its working class masses
residing in the Gulf states and its heterogeneous overseas intelligentsia composed of
middle- and upper class segments in the U.S. and the U.K.
In 2000, the Indian government's High Level Committee report estimated the total
217
Indian diaspora population to be approximately 20 million, including both Non-Resident
Indian citizens (NRI) as well as the broader population of ethnic Indian referred to as
Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs).161 Data in the government report indicated the NRI
population to be approximately 4 million. However, for OV scenarios, the distinction
between NRIs and PIOs appears uncertain, pointing out a major complication about who
would be eligible to vote. Presently, the benefits of overseas Indian citizenship (NRI
status) do not include political rights, but rather relate to visa, tax and employment
permissions. Recent efforts to facilitate and expand access to these classifications for
PIOs have been at the center of the Indian state's diaspora initiatives. Specifically, the
passage of a citizenship amendment in 2004 cleared the path for PIOs to become overseas
Indian citizens with greater ease and in greater numbers.162 Geographically, Indian
government estimates indicated the primary concentrations of the diaspora population to
be distributed as follows:163
Southeast Asia
Asia-Pacific
5,500,000
650,000
North Africa/Gulf region
3,000,000
South Africa
1,000,000
East Africa
200,000
Mauritius and Reunion
900,000
United States
1,700,000
Britain
1,500,000
Canada
840,000
Caribbean/Latin America
1,100,000
source: Government of India
161 High Level Committee Report 2000, Foreword (v, viii) and ―Estimated Size of the Overseas Indian
Community.‖ http://indiandiaspora.nic.in/contents.htm (14 April 2009).
162 NRI Online, section on ―India / US Dual Citizenship.‖ http://www.nriol.com/returntoindia/india-dualcitizenship.asp. (14 April 2009).
163 Table from Waldman 2003, India harvests fruits of diaspora, New York Times. See also Wikipedia,
Non-resident Indian and Person of Indian Origin.‖ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_diaspora (14
April 2009).
218
The geographic and economic breadth reminds us of the need to distinguish
between diaspora as an element of identity, on the one hand, and as an objective
designation—a population of overseas nationals— employed here and developed in a
growing niche scholarship.164 Indeed, as we contemplate the India case, these
characteristics remind us to remain critical and avoid overstatement in assessing the
diaspora politics phenomenon: the existence of millions of overseas nationals does not
necessarily signify the emergence of a new political actor. One may emerge, but there is
not an automatic relationship.
State-led diaspora politics in India
Overseas voting has emerged in the recent period to join the agenda of India's
diaspora politics, however for various reasons, it remains a second-tier issue of
questionable intensity. Foreign Minister Sinha's comments in 2004 pointed out the
preliminary nature of the issue: ‗‗India is a democracy and democracy does not merely
mean casting a vote once in a while. It means accountability on a daily basis,‖ Sinha said.
―Whether they (dual citizens) be given political rights or not is an issue which has to be
widely debated in the country for a while before reaching a decision.‖165 However, the
diversity and dispersion of the overseas Indian population has made the political
organization of the diaspora multi-stranded, without a unified demand-driven movement
for voting rights from abroad. There has not been a unified interest in OV, but instead a
steady and growing visibility of a set of issues and arguments on behalf of particular
164 Key recent works developing the state-diaspora niche in international relations and comparative
politics include Ostergaard-Nielsen 2001, Sheffer 2003, Gonzalez Gutiérrez 2006, Adamson 2006,
Brand 2006 and Shain 2007.
165 Times of India. 2004. PIOs voting rights need to be debated: Sinha. 9 January.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/414941.cms (14 April 2009).
219
groups of Indians, often on internal sub-national and ethnic affairs.
Historically, however, the Indian state's posture to the diaspora has been one of
passivity and neglect, stemming from its hierarchical organization, its dedication to the
non-intervention principle externally and to its internal focus on state-led development
and the domestic needs of its population at the time of its founding in 1947 (Sharma
2006, 70). The Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has carried on the
responsibility formerly entrusted to the colonial Political and Foreign Service concerned
with territorial administration in its external dimension:
. . . to look after the general welfare of migrant Indians who were despatched by the
British Government of India to other parts of the British Empire as indentured laborer or
contractual labour from the third decade of the 19 th century onwards (Dixit 2005, 8).
The Ministry of External affairs has broader responsibilities than a traditional foreign
ministry, responsible not only for India‘s relations with foreign states and consular
functions but also for managing extradition of criminals and repatriation of foreigners
from India, emigration of Indian nationals and return of emigrants, and all immigration
from South Africa (Jain 1998, 49). Today, the MEA is the key institution in India‘s
foreign affairs: its policy planning board advises the Prime Minister on strategic policies;
Parliamentary oversight lacks substantive reach, while partisan politicization has been
minor except in Vajpayee‘s BJP government; and the Minister of External Affairs heads
an Indian Foreign Service with more than 3,500 career diplomatic officers deployed
across 203 overseas missions and the home ministry in 1998 (Jain, 53, 62-3).
Furthermore, the Indian Foreign Service has undertaken its consular work without
any legal recognition of people of Indian origin as Indian citizens (Dixit 2005, 8), and
there have been occasional charges of haughtiness for its treatment of Indians in overseas
missions (Jain 53). To redefine POIs as Indian citizens goes against the institutionalized
220
ethos of state interest and diplomatic service in the Indian Foreign Service. Reflecting a
higher than average level of professionalism, the IFS is an elite unit in within the total
Indian government that scored a 0.03 government effectiveness score in the World Bank.
With its strong bureaucratic capacities and its detached relationship to the diaspora
communities, the MEA is likely to prefer continuity in the practice of limiting overseas
voting to state employees only and not advocate against OV.
In the post-independence period, the Indian Government had been careful to
advise the overseas Indians to assimilate and identify with their countries of adoption
(Singh 2002). Indeed, the dominance of the Indian National Congress party resulted in a
sidelining of the private interests of overseas Indians, even as emigration boomed in the
1960s and 1970s. The collapse of the country's socialist economic model in 1991 led to
the election of the Hindu nationalist opposition party in 1998 and the beginning of the
deconstruction of the ―permit raj‖ and its stifling protections. Economic liberalization
proved favorable to diaspora Indians in two regards, first in the stark light cast on their
relative economic success compared to the home country; and more materially, in the
new openings to lucrative business opportunities in the home country.
State-led efforts at diaspora engagement began seriously in 2000, when the
government commissioned a High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora. The
Committee's 2002 report recommended an annual forum along with special attention to
improving the country's policy on citizenship in light of expatriate concerns and needs.
The report's editor stressed the cross-party nature of the board, deliberately designed to
forge a national consensus and implement the Indian government's diaspora institutions
beyond political party interest. More recently, commentators have criticized the
221
government for focusing its programs solely on overseas elites at expense of poorer
overseas Indian communities, as in Malaysia and Singapore (Kaur 2009, 87).
The most concentrated organization embracing the entire overseas community has
been the establishment of a state-led annual forum, the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas held
annually in New Delhi on January 9th through 11th since 2003. The annual Indian
―diaspora days‖ reunion have stimulated developments on a set of distinct issues,
including India's citizenship laws, social and economic needs of the Indians in the Gulf
region, economic interests of Indian diaspora investors and other philanthropic activities
including communal remittances, as well as more divisive ethnic issues involving
religion, separatism and wedge political issues. The divisive issues of ethnic politics
include violent separatist projects, such as Jammu and Kashmir, Sikh nationalism and
Hindu nationalism, with potential appeal for overseas party-building. At present, the
controversial issue of Hindu nationalism offers the major parties a potent (and polar)
vehicle for overseas party outreach emphasizing ethnic identity. Prior to liberalization,
the Congress-led corporatist India had eschewed active diaspora politicking. The BJP, the
Hindu Nationalist Party, first broke with the non-intervention principle and actively
fomented its cells of nationalist, upper-middle class conservatism in England and the U.S
(Brown 2007, 167; Jaffrelot 2007, 293).
The Indian National Congress party (INC) now also practices overseas outreach
involving fundraising; as with the BJP, it invokes the overseas voting issue to gain favor
in meetings with diaspora activists. Now governing the nation again, the INC has found
a source of support for its secular nationalism among Muslim NRIs in the Gulf region. In
recent years, at every one of the PBD ―diaspora day‖ reunions, the Prime Minister and
222
the Minister for External Affairs have addressed the voting question in terms ranging
from neutral to accommodating. And by 2006, the Singh government had introduced
legislation through the Parliament to enfranchise 20 million NRIs. However, the Indian
government actions were also consistent with the maintenance of a restrictive regime; to
date, they have not gone beyond legislative machinations. In the fine print of the INC
government's proposal to establish the right of NRIs to vote in Indian national elections is
the requirement that they return to the home district within the national territory to cast
the vote.
As of 2007, the Indian Parliament (Rajya Sabha) Standing Committee on
Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice had returned the bill with a 35-page report
to the Ministry of Justice for further analysis and deliberation (Parliament 2006). The
report equivocates and offloads costly political decisions. Suggesting a cautious
approach, the Committee highlighted as the most contentious issue discussed ―the right of
NRIs contesting elections once being registered as a voter,‖ further noting that ―the
people in general are apprehensive of the social, financial and political influence of the
Non-Resident Indians, especially the use of money power in the elections‖ (Section
18.7). On the other hand, the Committee suggested a concern with expansive accessibility
in pointing out to the government the need to consider ―the mode of casting votes by the
NRIs‖ and noting the bill would result in minimum participation (Section 18.12). The
absence of testimony from India‘s electoral commission or the MEA indicates that
overseas voting politics in India are still at an early stage. Diaspora relations with home
country politicians have begun, but the issue has yet to generate much discussion or any
contention.
223
The transnational structural analysis shows that any sustained advancement of OV
in India will have to overcome a number of obstacles. Consistent with the first hypothesis
(on p. 1) that remittance growth puts overseas voting on the national agenda, recent years
have seen an interesting uptick in attention devoted to the cause of overseas voting,
including the submission of an expansive voting proposal for NRIs by a Communist
Party legislator from the labor-export state of Kerala in 2007.166 Aside from the
Communists, the BJP party would have a natural incentive to join a coalition in favor of
OV. With the organizational bonds of overseas Indians loose and dependent on the state,
such insider linkages loom large as necessary conditions for OV but have not been
consolidated to date.
Most importantly along these lines, the ruling Congress party and the government
are the key factors. As we see in the professional, paternalistic nature of the Ministry of
External Affairs and its Foreign Service, India‘s overseas state possess the experience and
capacities in governing overseas organization to direct overseas organization, issue
framing and implementation as they please. Thus, the government‘s PBD days have
manipulated the question of overseas voting and sidelined any non-state diaspora
organization to date. In this context, elite insider strategies are likely to favor continuity
in the highly restrictive rules in coming years. Thus, for example, the legislature has not
yet acted on the much more far-reaching and expansive proposal for diaspora
participation offered in Shri Chanrappan's Non-Resident Indian Voting and Welfare bill.
The legislation includes expansive NRI voting as well as a National Commission for
NRIs, an assistance fund for overseas Indians, and embassy-linked participatory councils
166 http://164.100.24.219/BillsTexts/LSBillTexts/asintroduced/k.pdf via
http://www.parliamentofindia.nic.in/. On Indian emigration from Kerala to the Gulf states, see
Zachariah et al 2001 and Nair 1999.
224
in the diaspora cities. In India, instead, OV implementation remains highly restrictive,
and opportunities for legislative-bureaucratic obstruction are myriad.
Indonesia: Transnational activism, “money politics” prod open OV
Indonesia presents an interesting case of overseas voting in the lesser profile of its
diaspora and the mixed profile of its state characteristics. Its emigrants send remittances
but are largely working class residents in Malaysia. It is too large and centralized to
qualify as a paradigmatic weak state, yet too corrupt to mistake as a strongly
institutionalized state. The strongly nationalist polity, comprising 143 million voters on
500 islands, has had only one decade of political openness since the 1998 fall of
Suharto‘s authoritarian party-state.
In fact, Indonesia‘s recent shift to implement OV shows political remittances
playing out powerfully in a marginal case far less dependent economically on emigration.
Indonesia is an early formal adopter in which democratization advances have spurred the
recent development of an expansive overseas voting institution. Like India, it was among
the first great decolonizing nations, and as part of Sukarno‘s progressive orientation it
pursued a foreign policy of non-alignment for the first two decades of its existence. The
country‘s original 1953 electoral law established the right of overseas Indonesians to vote
in domestic elections; but with authoritarian politics obstructing multiparty elections until
the 1990s, overseas participation was limited to official voting by government employees
in the state‘s overseas embassies and consulates.
225
5.5
Indonesia OV Chronology
1945
1953
1999
1999
Formation of Indonesia, creation of Constitution
Election Law
Law #3 on the General Election
Overseas voting implemented for national legislature only (DPR).
Opposition Democratic Party of Struggle candidate elected President
1999
Election  Reformasi movement
2003
Electoral law #12 establishes National Election Commission (KPU) and right to vote from abroad
Opposition Democratic Party wins Presidency
April: legislative June: Presidential
2004
OV implemented for first time
Incumbent Sukoparni defeated
2009
National election – 2nd OV implementation
In 2004, approximately 250,000 diaspora citizens cast votes in the second round
of the Presidential election, favoring the opposition party candidate of Wahid by a 2-to-1
margin that was an exaggeration of the national vote (ANFREL). Overseas Indonesians
voted in embassies and consulates (EU report, 27), as the national election commission
(KPU) created an Overseas Election Commission in each overseas representative office.
Overseas Indonesians voted for legislative elections in 2004 in two districts (one assigned
for Malaysia and Singapore, and the second assigned to the national capital). In April of
2009, Indonesia held national legislative elections in a day hailed as a major step forward
for the nation‘s democratization, with over 123 million participating.167 Prior to the
election, the KPU announced that it had registered about 1.5 million overseas Indonesian
voters out of a total of 6.2 million overseas Indonesian workers.168
167 The Economist. 2009. Indonesian democracy: Beyond the crossroads. 2 April 2009.
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13403041 .
168 The KPU overseas registration figure comes from a Jakarta Globe posting on the Indonesia Election
226
With little more than a decade since the collapse of the Suharto dictatorship in
1998, Indonesia has developed relatively open and competitive elections. As the world‘s
fourth most populous state, it has over 3 million overseas citizens whose remittances
provide approximately $6.5 billion in foreign exchange in 2008, according to World Bank
estimates, an amount equal to 1.3% of the gross domestic product. The weakness of the
rule of law and the scale of patronage-ridden politics in the state apparatus suggest a
permeable and hence permissive condition for transnational entrepreneurs to organize
overseas workers along partisan lines in order to raise money and boost overseas
elections. On the other hand, potential institutional obstacles to overseas voting are
pointed out in the hierarchical administrative structures of Indonesia‘s state capitalism
(Hutchcroft 2002, 499) and the powerful role of anti-colonial nationalism and anticommunism as foundational principles of the modern Indonesia state (Anderson 2005,
153).
The government of Indonesia has a centralized Presidential system with 5-year
terms and a limit of two terms. The territory‘s 33 provinces encompass 500 inhabited
islands sprawling 3,200 miles across a 14,000-island archipelago. Enfranchising its 143
million voters has presented major logistical challenges, so that the peacefulness and high
turnouts since 1999 are considered a significant victory not only for Indonesia but for
democracy advocates in general.
The 2003 electoral law #12 established the KPU (Komisi Pemliham Umum) – the
General Election Commission—and guarantees the right to register and vote to
Indonesian citizens residing abroad. The system of voting is in person at the consulate,
2009 blog at http://indoelection2009.blogspot.com/2009/04/election-begins-for-indonesian.html.
227
and there are no provisions for mail-in voting (Article 25 and 26). The 2004 election was
a major race in a landmark election, the first instance of a direct Presidential election in
Indonesian history (EU, 28); with over 75% turnout, the incumbent Megowati
Sukarnoputri fell to popular army general Susilo Yudhoyono of the Indonesian
Democratic Party (EU, 58). Also that year, Indonesia held a massive set of legislative
elections on three levels (national, regional and local), the biggest and most complex
single-day elections organized in the world to date, with 2,286 electoral races held in the
same day.
Despite the scale of Indonesia‘s centralized authority, the state‘s bureaucratic
capacities in the electoral commission and the foreign ministry show instances of mixed
and weak institutionalization. Since its founding in 1945, Indonesia‘s Foreign Ministry
(Deplu) has experienced powerful incursions by the military and Suharto, and it has
struggled to develop its own corps of career diplomats commensurate with the
Indonesia‘s geopolitical significance. With a civilian staff of over 1,000 professional
officers in 110 countries in 1995, Deplu has managed to develop its capacities though not
to the point of being able to direct Indonesia‘s course on external affairs, which remain
subject to the country‘s turbulent national politics (Sukma 1998, 38-41). In the latest
decade, the reformasi movement has generated demands for more transparency and
greater space for non-state actors to participate in making foreign policy. One such actor
has been the migrant labor network coalition advocating overseas voting. Deplu has been
responsive to many of the reformasi demands, which points out the primacy of domestic
politics in shaping Indonesia‘s foreign policy making (Sukma, 45)
The electoral authorities are of little relevance in enforcing any standard controls
228
on overseas fundraising. The electoral agencies' decisions are a function of party
struggles, and its powers to impose penalties on offenders are weak with no instances to
date of enforcement, according to peer comments in one recent international assessment
of institutional quality (Global Integrity 2008, 33-43). Indonesia‘s overall score for
government effectiveness in the World Bank review was -0.41, the lowest of all six
countries profiled (Kaufmann et al 2007). ―Money politics‖ is a prominent part of
Indonesian politics, with vote-selling commonplace (Shimizu 2004). While it is
technically forbidden to accept donations from abroad (EU 2004, 42), the weakness of
enforcement capacities points out the permissive context and financial incentives for
expanding transnational partisan activities.
The commitment of the Indonesian state to protect its overseas migrant workers
has become a core part of national policy discourse, allowing space for the overseas
voting rights claims as in the Philippines. Indonesian migrant workers have their own
acronym adopted officially—they are the TKI—and they were recently hailed by the
President in a statement that shows the breadth of state commitments to uphold the rights
of overseas workers, economically and as citizens of the nation:
TKI are citizens, just the same as the other citizens. We should not differ in the service
and protection to every citizen. The government is and will keep on working to improve
and perfect the recruitment, placement, protection and service system for TKI . . . The
State is obliged to provide work opportunity for every citizen as mandated in the
Constitution . . . We made a bilateral cooperation with the TKI destination country and
place our staff as a labor attaché in every representative office abroad . . .169
The full quote is included since it points out not only the extent and variety of state
obligations in the President‘s conception of state-diaspora relations, but the explicit
application of Constitutional guarantees on behalf of its overseas nationals.
169 Presidential statement, 2006, ―Develop educated workers‖ 30 August. Available online at:
http://www.indonesia.go.id/index.php/content/view/1836/691/ (15 February 2009).
229
In the organization of Indonesian overseas voting, migrant worker NGOs and
official intergovernmental organizations have devoted their capacities to assist the
Indonesian government and fill in for its weaknesses. Indonesian labor NGOS emerged in
a wave of organization in the 1980s and 1990s (Ford 2004, 106). As in the Philippines,
the nation‘s labor advocates integrated themselves into a sprawling but vibrant networked
coalition of Asian labor NGOs, with Indonesian NGOs adapting political strategies that
utilized the language of development and human rights (Ford, 107). The NGOs have
advanced the overseas voting demands that have spurred the recent expansion of overseas
voting; in this regard, one crucial linkage has been the research and advocacy generated
by a collaboration of the Asian Network for Free Elections with the Asian Forum for
Human Rights and Development (Shimizu 2009). At the same time, multiple IGO
monitors and study teams have created a broad body of recent analytic work that reflects
the fruits of large-scale international assistance in support of Indonesia‘s democratization
(IDEA 2003 & 2007, European Union 2004, UNDP 2005, Global Integrity 2008, Wall
2007). Early evidence points to a potentially significant growth in overseas participation,
perhaps to over half of a million, suggesting that the Indonesian government has utilized
technical assistance with effectiveness. In sum, strong transnational civil society groups
have acted to push overseas voting forward in Indonesia, drawing skillfully on concrete
support from international actors within the permissive context of Indonesia‘s sustained
democratization.
Senegal: Hybrid transition, state erosion and consular patronage grow OV
The case of Senegal illustrates the effects of weak state structures upon the
expansion of overseas voting. Senegal resembles Mexico and the Dominican Republic for
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its experience with open elections, a historic instance of peaceful transition in executive
power, and a newly visible diaspora amidst neoliberal economic adjustments (Martin
1998). Yet in Senegal, a recent drift towards authoritarian politics calls into question the
durability of the overseas voting institution, as well as its significance as an external
contribution to democratic consolidation. Nevertheless, there has been continuity in the
gradual expansion of overseas voting at the same time that there has been some recent
erosion of political democracy in Senegal. At the same time, continuing growth of
overseas participation shows the institution‘s robustness despite the adverse domestic
circumstances. Democratization has seen an evolution from a PS-dominated ―party-state‖
to a weak party system of coalition and Presidential dominance (Martin 1998, x). What
led Senegal to implement overseas voting? And why have setbacks to the nation‘s
democratization not precipitated a slowdown in the rollout of overseas voting?
Since a major electoral reform in 1993, Senegal has implemented overseas voting
in the national elections of 2000 and 2007. In 2000, roughly 150,000 overseas Senegalese
registered made up 3% of the total electoral list, though overseas turnout was low at 41%
of all who registered (Vengroff, 106). In 2007, 270,418 overseas registrants equaled 5%
of the total registered electorate of 5.4 million (CENA Rapport General 2008, 174).
Participation also increased in the second exercise, with turnout up to approximately 55%
in 2007 and the number of countries up from 15 countries in 2000 to 35 countries in
2007.170 Overseas Senegalese are allowed a direct vote for President and a separate vote
for the national legislature, though the country‘s practice of holding legislative elections
170 Senegal limits participation to those countries in which it has an ambassador, and in 2000 it required a
minimum of 500 registrants for votes from given country to count, according to Vengroff (2007, 105).
Participation data for 2000 come from Vengroff, and those from 2007 come from Senegal‘s
Commission Electoral National Autonome (available online at http://www.cena.sn/).
231
later in the year has focused overseas organizations on the Presidential election. Overseas
participation was concentrated in three major areas: the nearby western African states,
western European states, and North America.
Senegal‘s diaspora population is approximately 5 to 10% of the national
population of 13 million (Diatta & Mbow, 256). It is heterogeneous and dispersed yet
closely linked to the home country society through dense transnational networks (Baird &
N‘Dyiaye 2006, 100). A former French colony with a long history of migration,
particularly among elite segments, Senegal has recently experienced an emigration boom
of greater magnitude and more pronounced transnational character fueled by economic
liberalization policies. The transformation of Senegal‘s economy from rural state-directed
to an urban informal services-orientation has failed to generate adequate economic
opportunities, with estimated per capita income of $1,800 and unemployment rates above
40% (CIA World Factbook, Encyclopedia Britannica). Remittances reached 8.5% of GDP
in 2007, up from 2.5% in 1990 (World Bank). Evidence of the significant human
outflows was evident in two crises involving maritime trafficking of Senegalese
emigrants: the sinking of the M.V. Le Joola in 2002 that scandalized the government
domestically; and, in 2006, the Canary Islands interception of Europe-bound Senegalese
migrants that spurred a coordinated response by the European Union.
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5.6
Senegal OV chronology
1961
National independence from France as Senegambia
1961 – 1992
Authoritarian rule under Presidents Senghor and Diouf (Parti Socialiste)
1993
Major electoral reform legislation includes overseas voting rights law
Formal independent electoral commission (ONEL) established
(reorganized in 2005 the Commission Electoral Nationale Autonome (CENA)
1997
Conseil des Sénégalais de l‘Extérieur established
2000
Peaceful transition from Parti Socialiste (PS) incumbent President Abdou Diouf to
democratically elected Senegalese Democrat opposition candidate Abdoulaye Wade
First instance of overseas voting
2002
Sinking of MV Joola leads to drowning of 1,800 Senegalese emigrants
2004
Arbitrary imprisonment of prominent journalist spurs news boycott
2006
Canary Islands emigration crisis
2007
2nd instance of OV implementation
Re-election of incumbent President Wade (SDS)
Opposition boycott of National Assembly elections
The recent emigration has broadened the geographic and demographic
characteristics, as well as the political preferences, of the Senegalese diaspora. Whereas
the traditional profile of Senegalese emigration showed a more conventional image of
dependency upon the French metropolitan core – more educated and more closely linked
to the French mercantile economy—the recent boom reflects a greater heterogeneity and
dispersion across multiple regions characteristic of globalization‘s non-state networks. As
Table 5.6 shows, the three largest concentrations of overseas Senegalese were located in
Gambia, Ivory Coast and France; since 1997, there has been significant growth in
emigration to Italy, Spain and North America. Multiple socioeconomic profiles include
rural and urban lower-middle class segments, as well as university-educated elites. The
233
organizational patterns of the diaspora have mainly been informal but show a variety of
forms developed in the last two decades, including civic associations, state-sponsored
Conseil Superior, and an important Sufi Muslim network. The sprawling growth of a farreaching official network of consulates and honorary consulates has played a role in
integrating these hybrid forms of Senegal diaspora politics.
Senegalese Resident Abroad, Official Estimates for 1997
Gambia
Ivory Coast
France
Italy
Mauritania
Egypt, Mali
Gabon, Guinea, Spain,
U.S.
Total
1997
300,000
150,000
60,000
60,000
30,000
30,000 each
15,000 each
714,000
171
source: Diatta and Mbow, 1997
As a polity, Senegal is eclectic for the mixture of authoritarian dirigisme,
personalistic rule, and pluralist clientelism. A former French colony, Senegal was
governed by a single party authoritarianism under the Parti Socialiste (PS) from the time
of its independence in 1961 until 2000. Authoritarian rule of Leopold Senghor (19611981) and Abdou Diouf (1982-2000) featured non-competitive elections while instituting
electoral opposition that grew gradually and especially from the 1980s.
In 2004 Wade‘s government arrested Madiambal Diagne, editor of the nation‘s
leading newspaper Le Quotidien following a string of critical reporting.172 The
government‘s repressive action led to a coordinated protest by the nation‘s media along
171 Diatta and Mbow identify as the basis of their 1997 estimates data from the Department of Senegalese
Resident Abroad within the Ministry of External Affairs.
172 Prier, Pierre. 2004. Chirac tance Wade sur la liberté d‘expression. Le Figaro (24 July), no. 18,651,
International section, p. 2. Obtained via Lexis-Nexis.
234
with significant external criticism and marked a broader trend of reversion to
authoritarian politics. In 2007, following the re-election of President Wade and ensuing
post-election disputes, opposition parties boycotted the national legislative elections
scheduled for that year,173 driving turnout down to 35%.174
State-diaspora relations in Senegal
The puzzle in Senegal is about which element of its hybrid politics would
dominate state-diaspora relations in terms of the overseas voting rules – state-led
programs and renewed authoritarian tendencies, increasing political pluralism and nonstate actors, or political clientelism in the context of a weak state. Furthermore, our
analysis must explain the counterintuitive result of overseas voting expansion amidst
increasingly authoritarian domestic politics. The state structure hypothesis fits the
Senegal case better than a domestic politics argument or a diaspora-led perspective.
From 2000 to 2007, voting by overseas Senegalese expands from 15 to 35 foreign
countries, overall participation and overseas voter turnout increase from roughly 75,000
to 150,000175, and the voting returns of overseas Senegalese shift from a pro-PS vote to a
pro-SD. Overseas voting in Senegal‘s 2007 election is organized in 807 bureaux de vote
in 434 locations across the 35 countries (CENA website), which make up 6.2% of the
total 12,894 bureaux de vote. 150,000 overseas votes would equal 2.7% of the nation‘s
5.4 million total electorate. Overall, the volume and geographic scope of reported
electoral activity, while not enormous, show clear growth to a level noteworthy in
relation to the poor economy of the home country.
173 Agence France Press. 2007. Sénégal: le boycottage des elections porte un coup a la démocratie. Dakar,
7 April.
174 June 3rd election note, Lawler 2009. Also New York Times, 2007, Senegal Bars a Singer, 15 December.
175 The participation figure is a conservative estimate from my review of available data from the CENA.
235
A domestic politics point of view would focus on party politics and authoritarian
tendencies. In Senegal, however, political parties are weak, with research indicating
evidence of fundraising as a causal force but no full-scale transnational organization.
Moreover, the legislature switches with the change in government. As in the Dominican
Republic, steady but incremental expansion across each of the main instances of overseas
elections occurs as a result of shared inter-elite consensus that overseas voting is a lowrisk move in the interests of all parties. From 1993 to 2000, under PS rule, according to
Vengroff‘s study of the 2000 election, ―the government felt that providing the diaspora
with an outlet in electoral politics would act as a safety valve and would only entail
limited costs and risks for the regime, while opposition parties saw the inclusion of
external votes as an opportunity to expand their influence and revenue sources‖ (2007,
105). Similarly, research into the most recent phase shows similar expansion under a
different government, and interestingly we see that the Wade government‘s authoritarian
tendencies did not lead it to alter Senegal‘s trajectory of overseas voting expansion. With
the country‘s weak political parties and with no variance in the positions taken by
governments of different coalitions, then, we see that a domestic politics perspective does
not explain the expansion in the nation‘s overseas voting. How then do we explain the
Senegal case?
A diaspora-led perspective points out the shifting preferences of overseas
Senegalese, arguing that a more diverse and dispersed diaspora voted in 2007 in favor of
the traditional opposition party as opposed to the elitist vote of 2000 that favored the
traditional ruling PS. First, while the diaspora vote shifted, it followed the shift in
government, suggesting the possibility of effective electoral strategies involving political
236
clientelism. In other words, when the PS controlled the consulates, the diaspora favored
the PS due to its position in power, whereas control over consular largesse enabled SD
incumbents to curry diaspora favor with it.
Senegal‘s weak state has seen an increase in personalistic use of resources for
political clientelism, across all range of activities in the recent period, according to Mbow
(2008). In the relevant bureaucracies, the Wade government has introduced bureaucratic
shuffles and new policy lines consistent with consular patronage politics. Senegal‘s
Foreign Ministry has changed its structure, disbanding the Conseil des Sénégalais de
l’Extérieur and dropping the division for Senegalese residents abroad into a separate
ministry for tourism and artisanship. Similarly, the Wade government reorganized the
nominally independent electoral commission, the ONEL, and relabeled it as the CENA.
Senegal‘s overseas elections are managed by the consulates with in coordination
with the electoral commission. According to an independent evaluation by Washingtonbased electoral transparency monitor called Global Integrity, the CENA is professionally
staffed and structured, but limited in its resources. Its own press releases and election
reports show no principled concern with territoriality as an objection to overseas voting;
rather the CENA apparently relied heavily on the consulates to conduct the registration
for and implementation of overseas voting (CENA 2007). Not surprisingly, there has been
concern about the consular misuse of electoral registrations, with overseas Senegalese
publicly demanding transparency over alleged transshipment of the cards for electoral
fraud at home.176
According to the Foreign Ministry‘s website, Senegal‘s roster of embassies and
176 Fall, Aly. 2009. Les Sénégalais des Etats-Unis reposent le problème des cartes doubles. Le Quotidien.
Dakar, 7 February.
237
consulates showed diplomatic representation in 70 nation-states with 73 missions in
addition to dozens of consulates and honorary consuls. The high number of honorary
consulates is consistent with consular patronage politics, since these posts are used to
curry favor with important members of the diaspora in return for political support. In
Senegal‘s case, it shows many of these occupied by resident country nationals, evidence
of a weak state unencumbered by Vienna Convention norms that restrict diplomatic
representation to non-nationals of the resident country. Altogether, the overseas state
structure hypothesis proves to be accurate in the Senegal case, offering explanatory
leverage and insight into the remarkable and somewhat unexpected outcome of open
overseas voting growing in a poor struggling democracy. In Senegal— again— a weak
state permits elite actors to expand overseas voting as a means to build ties with
financially and politically lucrative sources in the diaspora.
Ghana: Charismatic politics, polarization and diaspora exclusion
Ghana passed a constitutional amendment to enfranchise overseas citizens in
2006, and it was recently celebrated by Stockholm-based IDEA as a prominent African
understudy on the verge of adopting open overseas voting.177 However after intense
politicization of the matter in 2007, overseas voting was not implemented in the
Presidential election held in December 2008. This outcome is surprising in light of the
country‘s similarity to Senegal along major economic and political lines. Recent decades
have seen increasing activism among overseas Ghanaians including a concerted push for
dual citizenship in the 1990s and calls for overseas voting access in more recent years. In
contrast to many cases, however, Ghana‘s diaspora is thought to hold significantly
177 International IDEA, ―Ghana prepares for external voting,‖ 3 May 2007. Available online at
http://www.idea.int/elections/ex_voting_ghana.cfm (15 April 2009).
238
different, more conservative, political views associated with support for the traditional
opposition party. This conflict raises the question of how the opponents of overseas were
able to outmaneuver OV advocates and block implementation in the 2008 election.
5.7
Ghana chronology
1953 – 1966
Rule of President Kwame Nkrumah (first of Gold Coast, then Ghana)
1957
Ghana‘s independence from Britain
1966
Military coup deposes President Nkrumah
1981
Air Force Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings establishes rule following 1970s countercoups
1992
Multi-party elections make Rawlings first constitutionally elected President
1996
Re-election of President Rawlings (National Democratic Congress – NDC)
2000
Election to Presidency of opposition candidate John Kufuor (New Patriotic Party - NPP)
2004
Re-election of President Kufuor with NPP legislative majority
2006
OV law passed as Representation of the Peoples Amendment Act (ROPAA)
2008
No implementation of OV in election by Electoral Commission
Election of NDC candidate John Evans Atta Mills
Ghana‘s remittances are likely three times greater than official counts (Mazzucato
et al 2008, 104). Based on data from the central Bank of Ghana, the Migration Policy
Institute estimates that in 2006 Ghana received foreign remittances equal to $1 billion, or
roughly 10% of its national economy. Likewise, estimates of Ghana‘s diaspora
population range between two and four million Ghanaians abroad, of which the
conservative estimate would equal roughly ten percent of the national population of 21.7
million in 2004 (Bump 2006, 3; Sabates-Wheeler, 7). In comparison to Senegal, Ghana is
a slightly larger but similar small-medium size country, with a similar economic
development level at income of $1,500 per capita, a greater proportion of its population
239
abroad, and a greater level of economic dependency on their remittances.
With a long history as destination, transit and source country, Ghana has
experienced steady emigration since the mid-1960‘s (Bump) and especially since the
1980s. In the earlier decades following independence, an economic downturn together
with a move to join ECOWAS facilitated regional emigration to nearby fellow western
African states on temporary working visas, particularly in the 1970s. Political turmoil in
Ghana in the 1980s, both internally and in its regional relations, affected much of the
emigration of that decade, including a set of reciprocal actions by Ghana and Nigeria to
expel one another‘s foreign nationals between 1979 and 1983. As a result of Nigeria‘s
massive deportation action, as many as one million overseas Ghanaians were suddenly
uprooted (Peil 1974, 370). With Ghana‘s politics extremely unstable, many return
migrants opted to look to other regions of the globe rather than repatriate in the native
country‘s struggling economy. Beginning in the mid-1980s, steady streams of skilled
workers began to emigrate from Ghana to Europe and North America.
Principal destinations of Ghanaian emigration, beyond Nigeria and nearby
western African states, have been Britain and the U.S., as well as Canada, Germany,
Holland, Italy, Sweden and South Africa. ―Brain drain‖ has been a major reality,
particularly in the medical fields, with Ghana losing to emigration a staggering 69% of
general practitioners trained between 1995 and 2002 (487 out of 702 newly minted
medical doctors), according to a 2003 study by the University of Ghana (Bump). At the
same time, the ongoing and deepening nature of outflows spread into the nation‘s lower
socioeconomic ranks, so that by the mid-1990s emigration had become a ―basic survival
for individuals and families to cope with difficult economic conditions‖ (Anarfi 2000 in
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Sabates-Wheeler et al 2005, 5). The twin sides of what Anarfi call‘s Ghana‘s
―diasporisation‖ is evident in the facts that private construction of homes in Ghana is paid
for out of foreign dollar accounts, while in 1998, Ghana‘s government indicated that 58
foreign countries deported over 2,000 Ghanaian nationals (Anarfi,, 27-28).
In its organizational profile, the Ghanaian diaspora has been active in civic and
religious activities, forming hometown and regional associations to church building and
other local activities (Arthur 2008, 98-99). Above all, the strongly economic character of
recent emigration, social networks focused directly on employment and remittances have
been a principal form of organization, along with business ventures by private individuals
and partners often along informal lines. Political activism has been a less important part
of Ghana‘s diaspora organization, with the one exception of the movement for dual
citizenship (Owuso 2006, 279-81). Overseas Ghanaians engaged in an eight-year
networked campaign to oppose a provision of the 1992 Constitution that stripped
overseas nationals who naturalize in the resident country of their Ghanaian citizenship.
Blocked by President Rawlings, the diaspora campaign obtained its goal only in 2001,
when Ghana‘s Parliament passed the Dual Citizenship Act.
Formerly Britain‘s Gold Coast colony until its founding as an independent nationstate in 1957, Ghana saw its politics in its initial decades marked by nationalism,
economic stress, instability and violent interruptions in the form of military coups. Rule
by the military or by one party characterized most of the first four decades. In 1992, a
new constitution established the fourth republic, and Jerry Rawlings became the nation‘s
first democratically elected President. Today, Ghana is a unitary Presidential republic,
with a unicameral legislature, a strong Presidency with four-year terms, and ten
241
administrative regions. Since 1992, democratization has been characterized by alternation
in party control with a peaceful transition, pluralization and economic instability –
conditions similar to Senegal‘s politics. As in Senegal, political parties in Ghana are not
deeply institutionalized, with campaigns revolving around coalitions linked to
charismatic individuals (Salih 2008, 91-92). While sixteen parties are officially registered
with the Electoral Commission, two main forces dominate national politics: the New
Patriotic Party (NPP), the traditional opposition party that governed for two terms
through 2008; and Rawlings‘ National Democratic Congress that recently regained power
after leading the opposition with John Mills narrow victory in the Presidential election of
December 2008.
Interestingly, the founder of modern Ghana, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, was a product
of the Ghanaian diaspora in an earlier era. Nkrumah conducted college and graduate
studies and later taught in Pennsylvania, for ten years from 1935, followed by further
studies in Britain for three years before the independence politics drew him back from the
diaspora. As the leader of the independence movement and then first democratically
supported President of the first newly independent African state, Nkrumah was a major
figure in the development of African nationalism and Pan-Africanism, including his
leading role in founding the Organisation of African Unity in 1963. As President of
Ghana, however, early economic difficulties and Cold War politics overwhelmed
Nkrumah; following internal resistance to confiscatory economic policies and external
resistance to Ghana‘s involvement as a Soviet ally in Cold War struggles outside of
Ghana, a military coup removed Nkrumah from the presidency in 1966. Still, Nkrumah‘s
politics loom large in their commitment to regional pan-African institutions, investment
242
in state service and bureaucratic capacity, and one prominent example of pivotal
involvement in national politics from abroad.
Since officially recognizing itself as a country of emigration in 1994, Ghana has
taken a number of initial steps to institutionalize policy programs aimed at its diaspora,
though many of these remain nominal. In 2002 it legalized dual citizenship and a year
later established the Non-Resident Ghanaians Secretariat to foster diaspora linkages.
Initial studies have documented significant flows of return migration with skill
enhancement.
The overseas voting issue emerged officially when President Rawlings initially
identified it as a long-term priority for the national agenda in a 1996 State of the Nation
speech.178 In the present decade, however, diaspora associations have made persistent and
increasingly emphatic appeals for enfranchisement. In 2005, the leader of the Ghana
Leadership Union, a U.S.-based non-profit organization formed by overseas Ghanaian
professionals in the U.S. and Europe, published a detailed manifesto in the capital
newspaper calling for legislation and implementation of overseas voting for the 2008
elections.179
Ghana‘s Parliament passed overseas voting legislation on February 24th, 2006 in
the form of the Representation of the Peoples Amendment Act (ROPAA) despite major
political opposition, including demonstrations and threats coordinated by the opposition
NDC party. NDC leaders expressed concerns that overseas voting could be used to rig the
2008 general elections. According to one analyst, the NDC‘s mistrust was rooted in
178 The Daily Graphic. 2006. President, Christian Council meet over ROPA Bill. Accra (GH), 15 February.
Available online at: http://ghanareview.com/review/index.php?date=2006-02-15&id=13118.
179 Bonna, Okyere. 2005. Voting rights for the Ghanaian diaspora: A challenge for Ghana‘s Parliament.
Accra Mail. 29 June.
243
insider experience: ―Their party knows from its time in government how easy it would be
to rig elections if, as envisaged, diplomatic missions were used as registration centres and
polling stations, with government employees counting the vote‖ (Africa Research
Bulletin 2006, 16569).
NDC-led opposition to ROPAA deployed power bases of the former President
Rawlings coalition. Outside of Parliament, the anti-ROPAA coalition organized
thousands in a march on the legislature to demonstrate public opposition to the
amendment.180 NDC leaders called overseas voting in its current state a danger to
Ghana‘s national political stability, expressing concerns about damage to the credibility
of the electoral list. They made open threats to block implementation, threats that they
would uphold in the coming period prior to the 2008 election.181 Overseas Ghanaians are
predominantly supportive of the governing NPP, since many of them fled during the
military regime under Rawlings that gave birth to his NDC government (Africa Research
Bulletin 2006, 16569). Thus, the NDC sensed a clear interest in obstructing the incursion
of a massive, hostile voting bloc, and especially so as the Presidential election neared
given the relative parity in the support enjoyed by each of the two leading parties.
Thus motivated, the NDC was able to prevail over the diaspora advocates and the
majority party because of important structural capacities in Ghana‘s state bureaucracy
and in its own institutionalized power bases. It is important to remember that Rawlings
had governed the country for twenty years, before and after open elections. Concrete
evidence of Rawlings' led-NDC influence lies in its close ties to the national electoral
180 Thousands demonstrate against ROPA Bill,‖ Accra (GH): 15 February 2006. Available online at:
http://ghanareview.com/review/index.php?date=2006-02-15&id=13114.
181 Ghana Review. 2006. Defiant Bagbin issues apocalyptic warning,‖ Accra (Gh): 8 February. Available
online at: http://ghanareview.com/review/index.php?date=2006-02-01&id=12963.
244
commission, the CENA, which is sympathetic to the NDC (telephone interview with
Ghanaian political scientist, 2 April 2009)
Following the amendment‘s contested passage, the site of the struggle between the
NDC forces and OV advocates shifted from the legislature to the Electoral Commission
(EC). Formally authorized in the 1992 Constitution, Ghana‘s Electoral Commission has
recently been evaluated by independent non-governmental analysts as technically
proficient and professionally staffed, though also seen as lacking in resources (Global
Integrity 2008, 40). The determination to not implement OV in 2008 occurred in the EC,
which had been given wide latitude by the Constitutional amendment to devise the means
for implementing overseas voting. Interested in avoiding risk and ensuring adequate
resources for the agency, EC Deputy for Finance and Administration indicated early in
2007 that ROPAA would not be effective in 2008.182
In Ghana, a weak Foreign Ministry has been a secondary factor affecting overseas
voting outcome. The institution‘s weakness stems from different causes, and so it has not
been linked to transnational patronage. In the early 1980s, economic crisis induced
Rawlings to shift Ghana‘s external strategy from protectionist economic policies to a prowestern orientation rooted in structural adjustment and overseas development assistance.
As a result, the Foreign Ministry lost importance in relation to the economic
bureaucracies; more importantly with regard to diaspora politics, the Foreign Ministry‘s
focus became devoted to the pursuit of overseas development aid at the expense of
consular services (Akokpari 2005, 190). The lack of responsive service to overseas
Ghanaians and the absence of close relations with diaspora communities has made an
182 Ghana Review. 2007. Ghanaians abroad can't vote in 2008, Accra (Gh): 24 February.
245
already polarized relationship worse. If overseas voting does go forward, one can imagine
resistance to collaboration with the Foreign Ministry and problems in implementation.
In sum, Ghana‘s experience with overseas voting politics breaks from the general
pattern in which weak states have presented permissive contexts for transnational
entrepreneurs to migration fields to conduct partisan politics. Multiple ingredients give
rise to the blockage, in particular the domestic politics of the NDC party‘s opposition, the
electoral commission‘s concerns, and the Foreign Ministry‘s distance from diaspora
society. Analyzed in terms of transnational mechanisms, overseas fundraising occurs on a
small scale only, and transnational partisan organization remains stunted. Powerful
framing effects occur when vested actors in the establishment define overseas voting as a
risk to state. Rawlings‘ influence goes beyond party, having shaped the national
bureaucracies in the Foreign Ministry and the electoral commission. Moreover, the
polarization bred of a politically tinged emigration pervades Ghana‘s diaspora politics.
The precedents of sudden, massive deportations mean that for a significant portion of
Ghana‘s polity, overseas emigration represents political danger. The country‘s governance
score of -0.04 is stronger than Senegal‘s but still rather weak. Ghana‘s bureaucracy
retains ties to personalistic politics, and it is instilled with a strong commitment to
national-territorial jurisdiction. The neoliberal incumbent NPP party‘s decision to not
push overseas voting is especially interesting. Its narrow loss in the recent Presidential
election at the end of 2008 could easily have been – would have been – reversed by an
open implementation of overseas voting, given its greater closeness to the diaspora
voters. There is evidence that miscalculation did occur in the NPP‘s misreading of its preelection standing. But it is also possible that the NPP did not push overseas voting out of
246
a broader awareness that open implementation requires consensus beyond the ruling party
alone. Fear of post-election challenge linked to ―decisive‖ overseas votes is a real factor
in the heads of political decision-makers, as we have seen in Mexico.
Conclusion
What makes similar cases from the same region adopt different responses on
overseas voting? Looking beyond Latin America, we see that the overseas voting (OV)
phenomenon has traveled in a remarkably similar manner across the major regions.
Within the scope of countries specified –those I have labeled the labor-export
democracies—there is global convergence in issue emergence. Driving overseas voting
issue is the broad historical conjuncture experienced across much of the developing
world: democratization‘s third wave, growing labor emigration, and new technological
linkages in communications and transport. Together these three powerful forces have
made the question of long-distance electoral participation a staple topic in the second tier
of essential reforms for democratic consolidation. It arises like clockwork, generally as a
new idea in the 1990s and as an implementation issue in the recent decade. Yet while
there is a persistent convergence across regions in issue emergence, implementation
outcomes reveal instead a persistent divergence.
Table 5.8 summarizes the six case studies in terms of their OV outcomes and main
active factors leading to the result.
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Table 5.8
Implementation & Participation Outcomes
Outcome
Year(s)
Turnout
Government
Effectiveness
Overseas
state
Mechanisms
Adopt
2004,
2007
250,000
-0.01
Weak or
Mixed
NGO organizations
Friendly framing context
Embedded in diaspora
South
Korea
Deny
==>
Restrict
OK‘d
for
2012
--
1.26
Strong
India
Deny
No
--
0.03
Strong
Indonesia
Adopt
2004,
2009
200,000
330,000
-0.41
Weak
Senegal
Adopt
2000,
2008
75,000
150,000
-0.35
Weak
Ghana
Deny
No
--
-0.04
Weak
Philippines
Political openness
Persistent rights clams
Liberal norms in state
Strong state
National-territorial norms
Divided diaspora
Transnational NGOs ties,
migrant-friendly framing
Money politics abroad?
Weak state
Dense TN networks
Pro-OV consensus
Consular patronage
Polarized politics
National-territorial norm
Strong veto player
After describing the participation, it shows the government effectiveness score and the
nature of the overseas state as documented in this case. As it shows, there is a general
correlation between the nature of the overseas state and the OV outcome. This is
impressive when we consider that the case studies show evidence of different
theoretically specified mechanisms at work. Not all of the four mechanisms fit all of the
cases, but in each, we find government bureaucracies and actors at work in at least a
couple of ways as theorized—intermediating the politics of overseas voting in one
direction or another by means of fundraising controls, organizing the diaspora, framing
the issue, or implementation. Depending upon whether the overseas state is a strong
248
proactive guiding force or a secondary follower, it is a decisive factor, though not the
only factor. These mechanisms shape the stage for transnational politics and establish the
parameters in which domestic political elites assess the political costs and benefits of
overseas voting.
From the cases studied thus far, we can summarize the main conclusions as follows:
The existence of a significant remittance-sending overseas population in
democratic or democratizers is a sufficient condition for the emergence of the
overseas voting issue onto the national agenda.
The first requisite for open OV is a government that wants it, which requires both
a favorable disposition on the part of the ruling party and state actors in the
electoral commission and the foreign ministry;
More broadly, there must be consensus across main parties; otherwise, veto
players can obstruct the majority‘s OV project, if the risk of opposition challenges
does not constrain OV supporters from acting first.
In determining what makes political elites in the government and the parties
disposed to view overseas voting as an opportunity for political gain and not as
liability or risk, we have to look beyond individual parties or diaspora
characteristics.
The characteristics of the overseas state play a decisive role in shaping the
political incentives that guide elites in calculating whether to favor or oppose
overseas voting. States with strong transnational capacities can too easily control
overseas voting, raising doubts among opposition leaders about political gains;
furthermore, unless they have deeply internalized rights norms within state
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ideology, stronger states prefer to adhere to the doctrine of territorial jurisdiction
that eschews transnational elections. In states with weak transnational capacities,
political leaders of competing parties face fewer constraints and risks in extending
electoral competition into the diaspora, as long as diaspora preferences are
perceived as plural. In cases of polarization, when diaspora preferences are
perceived to be monolithically opposed to one party, that party‘s leadership will
emerge as a veto player to block overseas voting, even if transnational capacities
abroad are weak, as seen in the case of Ghana.
Finally, the qualitative analysis of the broader range of cases shows the need for a
richer and more specific conceptualization of overseas state characteristics. State
capacities in and of themselves are inadequate, since their impact and importance
depends upon what states want. The deployment of bureaucratic capacity depends upon
what norms and preferences the state has internalized. Therefore, we look not only at the
existence of strong bureaucracies in the electoral agency and the foreign ministry, but the
purposes to which these capacities are devoted. Is the state in its foundational thinking
and purpose committed to national-territorial jurisdiction and state interests? Or has it
internalized liberal norms to the extent that it prioritizes rights claims over state interests?
As the Table 5.9 shows, the overseas state framework accommodates not only the
yes and no cases, but also those involving complexity and change. India is a clear
instance of a hierarchically organized transnational governing structures that has
prohibited overseas voting; in its state characteristics and its outcome, it is similar to and
a more extreme version of Mexico. The polar opposite of these cases of state-led politics
are those of transnational patronage, in which weak state capacities and a favorable
250
disposition to liberal norms and rights claims enable an expansive growth in overseas
electoral organization. First identified in the Dominican Republic, the paradigmatic
―weak state with open OV‖ pattern is replicated in the developing labor export
democracies of Senegal, Philippines and Indonesia.
5.9
Overseas State Characteristics & OV Outcomes
Overseas state Capacities
professionalized,
autonomous
personalized,
dependent
No OV
ad hoc treatment of OV
state-led politics
charismatic politics
State
Nationalism
(Mexico, India)
(Ghana)
Liberal Norms
Managed OV
Open OV
&
gradual opening
transnational patronage
Rights Claims
(South Korea)
(DR, Senegal,
Philippines, Indonesia)
Territorial
Jurisdiction
&
Bureaucratic
Norms
&
Preferences
A number of countries have responded to OV opportunities or adapted their OV
rules in a way that exceeds the explanatory power of rationalist theories that take interests
as given. In Ghana, multiple factors point toward an open OV outcome including the
relative weakness of the state and the ruling party‘s support for OV implementation.
Looking at the nature of the overseas state, however, points out the institutionalized
251
power bases linked to a polemical leader opposed to OV and the commitment instilled
throughout the relevant bureaucracies in prioritizing state risk aversion over a liberal
approach to diaspora outreach and rights.
Finally, in South Korea, as we saw in Mexico and to a lesser degree in Indonesia,
strongly institutionalized bureaucracies committed to territorial organization and wary of
overseas voting as injurious to the national interest have evolved in their positions over
the years. In the face of pressure from newly formed non-state networks of diaspora
activists, these states have, to differing degrees, adopted gradual opening or a semirestrictive form of overseas voting.
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Chapter 6
Conclusion
A demographer viewing the earth from the moon in 2010, peering at the world on
a clear day with a strong demographic telescope, would observe a subtle change in the
global human landscape. Today as in 1969, the vast majority of the world‘s population
continues to live within national territories of birth. But now the blurry overlapping edges
are more apparent.
The 3% of world population who reside abroad are becoming increasingly visible.
Analysts, national leaders and activists can now see much better what has always existed,
namely the populations who inhabit the globalizing regions with overlapping clusters of
nations. In Southeast Asia and along China‘s coast, in the Persian Gulf, across North
America and western Europe, and throughout the word‘s large cities, international
migration commonly makes up between a tenth and a quarter of the population in the
resident and origin country. An old story, some say. It is true that that today‘s migration
builds upon historically founded migration networks. But new transport links have
expanded its absolute volumes, new technologies and trends in world politics have
altered its social and political dynamics, and accessible banking services have made the
accounting of financial flows much more complete. Migration scholars and advocates
hail the remittances and lively long-distance email chats that stream across borders as
evidence of a newly animated migrant agency. The proud economic and social citizens of
transnational migrants, indispensable providers, are lauded as heroes. Migrant leaders
repeat: what of our political citizenship?
To what country do migrants belong politically, and where should they exercise
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citizenship? One way to answer the question begins with the resident country, and more
and more countries have been involved in intensified debates over immigration, with a
thorough body of social science research. But another, equally important way is to
consider the home country. By law, the membership remains in the home country. By
habit, migrants retain bonds to the home country. Far less is known about this topic,
despite its burgeoning growth.
This dissertation has documented the global trend in overseas voting (OV). What
is behind the worldwide trend? The conjuncture of democratization, accessible
information technology and continuing cross-border migration has formed a permissive
global context for the trend. A world at war, or one swept up in a reactionary tide of
authoritarian government, would be less conducive to the trend.
From the research arise two arguments and a set of generalized statements of fact.
Overseas voting rules matter politically and merit their own analytic attention, I argue,
and overseas state structure is a crucial causal factor affecting the rules instituted.
Empirical findings clarify the relationship between economic remittances and overseas
voting. This chapter summarizes the dissertation‘s argument and main contributions,
considers its implications for debates about globalization, and closes with a discussion of
normative and policy issues related to overseas voting and transnational citizenship
politics.
I
Research question and core arguments
The study began with two questions. How do we explain divergence in the
openness of OV institutions adopted by the Dominican Republic and Mexico? More
generally, what factors make a nation-state more or less likely to implement OV along
254
open lines?
The dissertation‘s research concludes with two arguments along with a number of
generalized statements based on its empirical work. The first of these is an analytic
argument about how to study the topic: the politics of overseas voting are best understood
as a process of instituting overseas participation in home-country affairs. Overseas voting
elections entail three sequential stages: first comes legislation, then implementation, then
participation. The rules adopted matter not simply because of the evidence that they are
controversial and contested, though that is important, but moreover, since they
substantially influence the form and extent of diaspora participation in home country
matters. Voting at the consulate is different from participating in a cultural festival,
registering a hometown club, or receiving legal help with a child‘s birth certificate—to
offer a few examples of different forms of participation.
When countries do adopt overseas elections, the particular rules implemented
determine the range of likely participation levels. In many cases, a significant minority of
the diaspora population desires to vote, depending upon the rules of eligibility,
registration, campaigning and vote delivery. Frequently one hears that overseas masses
are apathetic and do not want to vote. Such a blanket claim is unsubstantiated, however –
we know that some of them do want to vote, based on consistent evidence from recent
survey research (Marcelli & Cornelius 2005, McCann et al 2007). Thus we should ask
why participation rates are low, keeping in mind the direct causal effects of the
implementation format upon participation rates. The case studies confirmed that the
voting regime affected the degree to which the ―significant civic potential‖ among
Mexicans and Dominicans was truly activated. As opposed to a purely behavioral view,
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the analytic argument here views participation dynamically, as a result of citizen attitudes
and preferences embedded in a social and institutional context affected by voting rules. In
this light, with evidence of intense political struggles, the rules as implemented merit
their own analytic treatment.
The second argument is the causal thesis about the impact of state structure upon
overseas voting. Put simply, the way in which a country’s government is set up abroad
structures its transnational politics and thereby influences the overseas voting rules that
it adopts. The core argument is, in a general sense, an old one: state structures affect
political outcomes, exerting a causal significance independent from societal factors or
decision-maker strategies. In its application to diaspora voting, however, it is original and
leads to a novel ―overseas state‖ thesis, which also includes a more nuanced version of
the main causal argument. With a consistent pattern in the cases studied, strong state
capacities in the foreign ministry and the electoral commission make overseas elections a
prohibitively risky prospect for politicians, who therefore opt to restrict or prohibit OV in
the face of potentially costly consequences to party and nation. In the absence of such
structures, when the state apparatus and national sovereignty norms are comparatively
lax, politicians perceive transnational communities as an opportunity for resources, flock
to them, and generate a dialogue that leads to expansive diaspora voting rights and rules.
Thus, in Senegal and the Dominican Republic, overseas elections expand in proportion to
the dense economic and social exchanges between diaspora and home country.
The effects of overseas state structures occur through at least four mechanisms of
fundraising controls, diaspora organization, framing effects and implementation.
Immediately, and even before OV enters appears on the agenda, the existence of overseas
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fundraising controls affects the practice of diaspora politics. When parties face the risk of
sanctions for foreign fundraising, overseas party-building is a non-starter. The existence
of a strong electoral agency capable of monitoring and policing activities abroad is a precondition that negatively structures insiders‘ calculations about whether to support OV
and pursue diaspora outreach.
The foreign ministry plays a central role in diaspora politics through the consular
infrastructure. Whether the consulates are part of a strong, autonomous bureaucracy or
instead resemble more permeable, client-led units affects the organization, activities and
goals of diaspora politics. In the former case, government initiative matters much more,
and this usually leads away from open overseas voting. In the latter case, non-state actors
from parties, civic groups and private firms take on prominent roles. The foreign ministry
and the electoral agency also take effect in the way that their bureaucratic interests and
conceptions of foreign policy and electoral management lead them to frame the OV
administration task within the domestic arena. Legislators seek their testimony as experts
on implementation. Overseas state actors committed to territorial organization and strong
sovereignty concerns inevitably present overseas voting in a negative light. Similarly,
bureaucracies of this nature are capable of and disposed to exerting heavy control over
OV when it comes time to hold the election. Weak states present far fewer encumbrances
of these sorts for overseas electoral organization; as a result, the incentives to engage with
the lucrative and vote-rich diaspora segment spur party leaders to prioritize transnational
entrepreneurship and support open overseas voting.
Overseas state structure entails not only the capacities but also the preferences of
the foreign ministry and the electoral commission. Ideological structure – norms as a
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basis for assessing the appropriate response of the state to overseas voting demands –
becomes a factor when strong states deviate from a generalized pattern of preference for
no overseas voting. In developing countries with stronger overseas states, doctrines of
territorial sovereignty and non-intervention make overseas voting problematic politically,
legally and diplomatically. Thus disposed against OV, such countries possess and exert
the capacities that block its adoption. In more institutionalized liberal democracies,
however, deeper commitments to democratic-rights norms within the relevant
bureaucracies lead them to respond differently, marshalling their capacities to roll out
overseas voting, as South Korea‘s recent turn exemplifies.
Rival explanations center upon legislator preferences, according to rationalists,
and diaspora characteristics, according to the ideographic case studies. Of these, I would
argue, legislator preferences are more important, since they are closer to the outcome of
OV rules as implemented. However, the sources and calculations that generate these
preferences are obscure. It is essential to probe the political construction of elite
preferences with regard to the diaspora. Here, I argue, overseas structure guides the
process by determining how accessible diaspora financial resources are to politicians,
setting the legal rules of political engagement, adjudicating the significance of OV in
relation to overall national security interests in domestic debates, and controlling the
manner of implementation. In all, the overseas state is crucially at work.
Main findings and contributions
Democracy and economic remittances are necessary conditions for overseas
voting, and the quantitative analysis confirmed that the levels of each were positively
correlated with open outcomes. First, a basic requisite for overseas voting is democracy
258
in the home country. The large-n study confirmed that levels of political openness were
positively associated with having an overseas voting law and open implementation in all
periods tested. Quantitative measures of democracy are based on two main components
of political rights and electoral competitiveness. How did the components of openness
matter or not in the case histories? Interestingly, process-tracing found political rights to
be more important to OV politics, since it allowed legal means and venues for diaspora
advocates to advance their voting rights claims. This occurred across all of the cases—
and mattered, whatever the final OV outcome (and impact of a strong state). In contrast,
the second component of democracy, electoral competitiveness, was not important in all
of the cases, although it existed in all. Instead, its effect of stimulating party competition
for diaspora favor was mediated by the overseas state factor, active only when the
overseas state was relatively weak, but otherwise shut down by strong states.
Secondly, the existence of cash remittances signifies a diaspora population linked
to the nation, without which there is no basis for overseas voting. Theoretically, a polity
could choose to issue the diaspora vote for citizens who do not send home any money,
though this is difficult to imagine in today‘s world. More importantly, the large-n study
found the volumes of economic remittances to be strongly correlated with open
implementation in the recent period.
Process-tracing research helps to interpret the widespread statistical correlation
between economic remittances and open implementation. In the mid-1990s, the Central
Bank of the Dominican Republic first recognized remittances in the national accounts,183
and it took little time and action for overseas voting claims to emerge on the national
183 Author's interview, former Chairman, Central Bank of the Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo, 27
July 2007.
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agenda. And so in many other countries at this time, the economic fact entered the
political arena, and professions of deep solidarity with the overseas nationals ensued—
not only in Latin American countries but across world regions, a global pattern associated
with the world-historical conjuncture noted above. However, governments, politicians
and activists were unable to tax or intermediate the remittances in a material sense.
Instead, they struggled to tap the rhetorical resources contained in the flows—to credibly
associate themselves with the patriotic aura and home-country kin of the emigrant
workers. In overseas voting legislation debates, the statistical findings suggest, the
magnitude of remittances may correspond to their power as a rhetorical resource. The
more remittance-dependent, on average, the more rhetorical punch the diaspora advocates
pack in contests to shape OV rules. However remittance volumes are just one factor; they
do not cause open implementation, as OV outcomes in world remittance leaders Mexico
and India make clear.
Thirdly, the large-n study also offers clarification about the relevance of singular
factors of scale, wealth, regime age, and population. To begin with, relative scale of the
transnational sector in relation to the nation mattered far less than the former‘s absolute
magnitude; in other words, proportional variables (remittances as a percentage of the
economy, diaspora citizens as a percentage of the national population) showed no pattern
of significance across the statistical tests—in contrast to the absolute volumes. This
signals that we should analyze the effects as independent factors, as opposed to
composites that conflate two variables. Secondly, GDP and regime age were positively
correlated in the historical time-series but not in the recent years. In the recent decade,
neither higher income nor regime age has mattered, since so many developing
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democratizers have been moving ahead with OV legislation and implementation.
Fourthly, diaspora population size was found to be positively correlated with
having a voting law in the model based on recent years, a shift from no correlation during
the time-series consistent with the global OV trend. Diaspora population size showed a
weak negative correlation in the recent years with open implementation. The findings
suggest that in countries with larger diasporas, the politics of overseas voting may shift
from rhetorical competition to risk aversion during the run-up to implementation. The
shift occurs as decision-makers, who have approved overseas voting in principle,
contemplate the myriad prospects of diplomatic and political complications arising from
a first massive overseas election. Mexico and Ghana stand as exemplars among the cases
studied.
Fifthly, national population size is highly negatively correlated with both overseas
voting laws and overseas voting implementation. The latter negative correlation occurred
with high levels of statistical significance not only in 2000 and 2004 years but also across
the larger span tested in the time-series model. The overseas state argument provides
insight into the political logic behind the correlation. Thus, it helps to momentarily
consider states as ―stationary bandits‖ rooted in control over a particular population and
territory (Olson 1993, 568).184 States derive their power from the achievement of
concentrated control over a large nation in one central authority. The larger the
population, the more resources available for the state to extract. The concentration of
power in large nation-states is particularly significant in foreign relations, in which a
strong foreign ministry is a basic face of large nation-states and great powers. On
184 Olson‘s concept applied here helps explain why overseas state effects would be stronger in countries
with large populations. His broader theory of property rights leading to political liberalization is not
relevant here.
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average, then, larger populations offer more support for hierarchical overseas state units
prone to monopolizing political spaces in the abroad.
Academic contributions
The dissertation contributes the first systematic comparison of overseas voting
institutions, which cannot be explained simply as a result of democracy plus diaspora
remittances. Drawing upon multiple research methods, its research fashions a contextsensitive institutional approach of qualitative political science to a topic overlooked by
the field. The analytic framework includes a disaggregated dependent variable, testable
hypotheses, and empirical analysis across world regions. The overseas state thesis
introduces the first causal explanation, a theory that accounts for more variance than the
existing literature‘s single-case studies. Based on this framework, the comparative
analysis identifies patterned regularities as well as divergence in overseas voting politics.
The same also leads to particular insights in the case studies – for example, in the causal
agency of transnational migrant labor groups in the Philippines, or the effects of state
norm change in South Korea. The dissertation reveals transnational political mechanisms
at work, consequentially, in grounded national sites.
Overseas state structure builds on the strengths of the mainstream approaches of
structuralism and rationalism. Its emphasis on bureaucratic structure defined as capacities
and ideology harkens to a long tradition in IR and comparative politics, building on the
incipient OV literature. The argument is flexible in its ability to develop more nuanced
explanations where necessary (Table 5.9). Its acknowledgement of powerful domestic
interests and incentive-driven elite calculations underlies the research design; it anchored
its field work in the decision-making centers of national politics. The analysis is
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innovative in its question and its dependent variable, and it has benefited from a
systematic approach. Recognizing the tradeoff between depth and breadth in executing
any research strategy, the dissertation diversified its approach to include three approaches
of deep qualitative case study, large-n analysis, and extension case studies.
Limitations of this study point out ways to improve the research going forward.
One item is to conduct a case study of a democratic country that prohibited overseas
voting. The mini-case studies sought to make up in part for this shortcoming with the
research on India and Ghana. The quantitative analysis was limited by the absence of data
available on the ―stateness‖ of the overseas units. As well, further within-region study
would be worthwhile in the future, particularly in the Latin America field, noting the
variance pointed out in chapter two (Table 2.4). In future research, an effort to find or
fashion a proxy indicator of overseas state capacities will be worth pursuing.
Alternatively, absent sufficient data available for large-n testing, one strategy for further
research into the dependent variable would be to conduct a medium-n study using ―fuzzyset‖ or Boolean algebra techniques on Latin America cases (Ragin 2000, 149, 241).
In theorizing overseas voting rule outcomes, I do not mean to suggest that
overseas state characteristics will explain all variance, but rather that they exert key
causal effects that play a large role in determining outcomes. A state structure argument is
sometimes criticized as an apolitical argument; however, the study‘s qualitative analysis
and specification of causal mechanisms renders the criticism of crude determinism
inapplicable to the overseas state argument. This formulation specifies structure in two
particular overseas state units, includes two dimensions (capacities and preferences),
locates and requires agency in each of four specified mechanisms, and also is malleable
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over time. Whether the state units are strong or weak, whether their normative ethos is
nationalist or liberal, structural effects rely upon state actors interacting with migrant and
party leaders. In Mexico, for example, the Foreign Ministry doctrine established national
foreign policy priorities at odds with expansive overseas voting. But the Ministry‘s
impact upon the OV outcome relied upon the action of Chancellor Derbez to testify in the
way that he did. Derbez‘ testimony is consistent with what the theory predicts on the
basis of his role. But a different Chancellor, in a different moment, might choose to act
differently. As discussed, norm change within the state can occur and alter bureaucratic
preferences.
Simplest is best
What would William of Occam say? In democratic countries, consensus politics
and weak states favor open implementation, while polarization and strong states with
concentrated power make it unlikely. In order for a country to implement open OV, the
government has to want it and push for it, and the opposition party cannot oppose it
entirely. Generally, political conditions of war, national security threats, strong
nationalism or xenophobia undermine the prospects for such consensus. Across the eight
country cases studied, evidence consistently confirmed the negative effects of a strong
overseas state on open OV. Such concentrated power undermines inter-party trust in the
overseas rules of the game, leading political insiders to take seriously the possibility of
overseas fraud. In such cases, logic and case evidence suggest that opposition leaders are
more likely to hold out against open OV—so as to prevent fraud or other manipulation by
the strong overseas state. The fear of a government-managed ―election of state‖ – an
official election limited to government employees and a sliver of the diaspora linked to
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the ruling political class—is evident in the opposition party calculations in Mexico and in
Ghana.
III
Implications for theories of globalization and institutional change
Transnationalist scholars have documented and explored a thriving but overlooked
space of informal migrant society, providing an empirical point of departure for IR
research. In bringing transnational communities into the field of international and
comparative politics, the political study of overseas voting identifies a migrants-nationstate dilemma—a concrete problem with implications for theories of globalization and
institutional change.
Overseas states, migrants and nations
The study of overseas voting points makes clear the historical conjuncture of new
technology, sturdier democratic norms and intensified interdependence. Amidst the broad
system-level forces at work, the nation-state is in transformation, too. The problem
centers on the adaptation of its institutions for an extra-territorial polity. The extent and
forms of such change vary significantly across countries, with the case studies showing
three different types of overseas institutions adopted, namely party-led, state-led, and
civil society-led. Overseas voting politics are one important phenomenon driving the
transformation, and overseas state structure is a key inherited factor shaping
transformation in a path-dependent manner and helping to explain the divergent
outcomes.
Consulates play a central role in diaspora politics as the public symbol of the
nation-state's legitimacy and the physical site of public venues for overseas nationals.
State structure is a powerful reality rooted in the sovereignty principle and sanctioned by
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the international system. Let‘s imagine the perspective of an expatriate citizen intent on
politically reconnecting with his or her global nation at a pivotal historical or electoral
moment. Long-distance participation raises a few concrete questions. Where is the public
space, and what are the rules for access to that space? Who runs the government and
where is it? At this point, emigrant belonging to a separate home country is not just a
subjective matter of identity. To remain real, belonging requires public institutions, which
involve state structures due to the nature of the international system. Generally, due to the
Westphalian institution of territoriality, the consular infrastructure stands out not only as
critical signifier of nation, but also as physical arena for public affairs abroad and legal
pipes connecting the diaspora to home-country structures and authorities.
The role of the consulates signals a reality at odds with the transnationalist view:
the use of nationality as a political resource for legitimization remains in large part,
though by no means entirely, dominated by states. The ―globalization from below‖
perspective implies that national community can thrive by circumventing states
structures, utilizing technological linkages and civic organization. However, overseas
actors who lack access to public venues are likely to remain stunted and subordinated to
government actors in home and resident countries. Creating public institutions out of
informal spaces is problematic as long as powerful state units exist.
The exchange of political resources between diaspora and home-country actors
flows in both directions, requiring a conception of state-led remittances. In Mexico, for
example, transnational entrepreneurship related to emigrant politics consisted in large
part in the bureaucratic innovation of state actors in the foreign ministry, the state
governments, and the national electoral commissions. A leading example is Carlos
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González Gutierrez, a Foreign Ministry career officer and founding Director of the
Institute for Mexicans in the Exterior (IME), whose writings have advanced the strategic
thinking within Mexico's acercamiento policy during the last two decades (1997, 1999,
2006, 2007). González' leadership shaped the IME's model of state-led social service
provision and guidance of a transnational ―network of networks‖ uniting overseas
Mexicans in systematic dialogue with the government. The IME programs185 have taken
on particular importance given the country's rejection of open electoral institutions.
Despite its restrictive voting rules, Mexico has earned a reputation for bureaucratic
innovation in state-diaspora programs among labor export governments across the global
level, as a result of efforts by González and other state actors.
A second instance of state-led entrepreneurship points out the causal effects of the
overseas voting trend upon epistemic network formation and formal global processes. In
the 1990s, the overseas voting area had been an international policy vacuum. Electoral
authorities in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and other developing countries were
explicitly aware of diaspora participation as a missing element in national
democratization efforts. They came together in international technical bodies in search of
resources for resolving their own national administrative challenges. Motivating the
collaboration was a shared set of desires to legitimize fledgling democracies, identify best
practices based on comparative learning and pooled data, and establish enduring electoral
institutions for overseas participation. Drawing upon support from international NGOs
and the U.N., the epistemic network has advanced new institutional standards for
overseas voting at the international system level, which now exist as a meaningful
185 Laglagaron (2010) reviews the programs of the Mexican government‘s Institute of Mexicans in the
Exterior.
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normative reality and administrative standard that transcend developing countries.
Migrant diasporas in world politics
For IR theories of transnational relations, diaspora citizens and groups are an
important but different type of TNA. Even as they incur upon international politics in
unexpected ways, diaspora groups are more local, particular, rooted and ascriptive in
nature in contrast to the elitist, cosmopolitan and universal aspects of more established
transnational types, such as the UNDP, CEMEX, and Amnesty International, for example.
The vogue in diaspora studies should not be mistaken as a fad since it rests on a deep,
underlying conjunctural change
As a different type of transnational activity, emigrant diaspora politics are
animated by the local domestic politics of national memory and partisanship rooted in
family and social ties. The translocal and regional elements mean that the more active
organization frequently involves social networks at subnational levels. In the Dominican
Republic, emigrants draw on party ties abroad as a social network, initially, and then as a
means to translate higher dollar earnings in New York into social and political prestige in
the home country. The density and volume of exchange of Dominican transnational
networks make home country party leaders and diaspora actors indistinguishable as
transnational political entrepreneurs.
Overseas voting politics thrive on the activism of diaspora activist networks. In
Mexico, one such coalition struggled to break apart the autonomy of an exclusive
national polity with mixed results. La Coalición formed across parties in 2003 as a
transnational lobbying campaign of overseas activists, civic leaders, and domestically
based academics and government insiders. Utilizing the Internet along with direct
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lobbying, La Coalición mounted an agile and relatively effective lobbying intervention in
2004-05. The campaign combined symbolic politics, moral leverage and accountability
politics186 as an effective means of pressing their agenda to a vote against the best efforts
of national legislators. The 2005 legislative compromise of restrictive reform reflected
the limits to the coalition's leverage, though it was a partial success.
Re-nationalization, not denationalization
As case study evidence shows, emigrant diaspora politics fail to fit two standard
perspectives of statism and systemic norms. On the one hand, a conventional state-centric
perspective would leave out the diaspora actor. Secondly, a system-level view associated
with globalists overlooks the varied processes and institutional channels that embedded
actors confront. Moreover, the latter view emphasizes a global logic of denationalization.
Emigrant diaspora politics do show a global logic in the common modes and templates,
but the activities and purposes center upon individual national authorities, utilizing rightsdemocracy norms in localized transnational circumstances. Rather than denationalization,
the overseas voting trend and the broader diaspora activities reflect a contrary move to renationalization.
In today‘s world politics, a defining characteristic of the international system is
the ubiquitous condition of nation-statehood. The tendency to posit forces of
globalization in opposition to the nation-state reflects an ahistorical view of today‘s world
politics, which leads to a false choice between system-level change or accurate
accounting of varying case outcomes. Refuting the convergence thesis does not mean,
however, that change in the world is not afoot. For example, soft power may be working
186 Keck and Sikkink define information, leverage, symbolic and accountability politics (1998, 21-25).
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in new ways, at times. The solution to the problem lies in recognizing the close ties
between globalization and nation-state transformation, historically and today. Rather than
downplay cross-border linkages and organization, the OV state thesis points out the
parallels between globalization and state-building, both as an ongoing continuity of the
modern era as well as a particular expression of the present moment. Globalization,
defined as more integration, more exchange and flows across borders, has been propelled
by the G-7 powers and the European colonial empires that preceded them. Our post-Cold
War period reflects a broader continuity across the modern era of simultaneously
expanding nation-state dominance and expanding cross-border interdependence.
State-diaspora relations should be of interest to IR scholars of all varieties,
including realists and other materialists for whom overseas citizens make up an ever
more accurately mapped, catalogued and visible source of strategic human resources for
nation-states. Increasingly, world events are leading to a greater recognition of Nye's
insights about the changing nature of power in the contemporary era (2004, 3-4).
Whereas the Cold War mentality understood national power mainly in military terms,
national power today is recognized as multifaceted and rooted not only in military
capacities but also in a country's ideological and cultural appeal, its economic power, and
its human capacities. Structural changes suggest that analysts recall the wisdom of
classical realism that counted human leadership and population as important determinants
of nation-state power. Various macro-forces are behind the widespread movement by
state actors toward an active cultivation of diaspora relations. From democratization ―ballot power‖ -- to consumer capitalism -- ―market power‖ -- to the requirements for
scientific and financial breakthroughs-- ―brain power‖ -- large populations represent
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potential for political and economic returns. These forces are likely to sustain the
processes of extraterritorial organization now transforming the nation-state—IR‘s basic
unit.
Neo-medievalism
Some IR theorists have argued that we are entering into a neo-medieval world
polity, defined as ―a system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty, held together
by a duality of competing universalistic logics.‖ Originally formulated by Hedley Bull in
The Anarchical Society (1977, 254), the neo-medieval conception actually corresponds to
the present era better than to Bull's era, according to Jörg Friedrichs and his application of
the five original criteria : i) regional integration of states; ii) disintegration of states; iii)
restoration of private international violence; iv) transnational organizations; and v) global
technological unification (2003, 482). One feature of the transformed landscape is the
arrival of influential non-state actors, such as transnational networks of scientists,
activists and local actors that mobilize campaigns around principled issue objectives and
affect international institutions. We now have diaspora activist networks, the expatriate
coalitions of fellow nationals informed by a global vision yet sharing a national political
project, a phenomenon that this research has substantiated.187
Imagining a world marked by the overlapping membership and jurisdictions of
global nation-states suggests confusion and contestation and brings us back to Bull's
image. In the medieval world, the dual logics of Christendom and empire provided
universal principles to anchor and stabilize a plural and chaotic-sounding medieval
landscape. Today the two logics are international capitalism and democratic nation-states,
187 See Keck and Sikkink (1998, 1-38) regarding transnational activist networks; see González Gutierrez
(2006, 12) regarding diaspora networks and their relations to states, in turn referring to Vertovec
(2005).
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with the latter's territorial organization and its grip on political identities blocking any
full-fledged onset of neo-medieval conditions. Diaspora settlement and overseas
citizenship have made the notion of ―global nations‖ somewhat real. Today in their
infancy, their life-span uncertain, global nations may not continue to thrive. However, it
is relevant to consider that they could, a fact with implications for our world today.
The possibility of global nations points to a scaled-down version of neomedievalism, in which deterritorialized nation-states have reinvented themselves to
sustain national communities across the different spatial patterns associated with today‘s
capitalism. In this model, multiple overlapping authority and membership is the basic
characteristic that contrasts with our present system, but it is anchored and stabilized by a
reinvented organizing logic of nation-state hierarchy, deterritorialized but retaining its
authority based on precedent and evolving sovereignty norms. The convergence of
international capitalism would sustain technological unification and a defining role for
transnational actors including highly empowered individuals and private networks, while
it would retain resurgent nation-states capable of evolving as deterritorialized units,
perhaps with even greater historical and functional differentiation, with alternative
evolving models of dependency as well as capitalism.
IV
Normative and Policy Implications
Are political remittances good or bad? Overseas voting presents a unique form of
long-distance politics, different from elite intrigue and violent extremism often associated
with diaspora. However, case study findings present a certain ambiguity for the
normative analysis. Both the Dominican Republic and Mexico have formed institutions
that are not serving their millions of citizens abroad, though they have gone astray in
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different manners. In the Dominican case, openness to diaspora participation has come at
the expense of a competent government capable of planning policy beyond one electoral
cycle. In Mexico, state-diaspora relations are a mixture of ―safety-valve‖ politics of
exclusion and a more enlightened doctrine of state-led provision and incorporation. In
both cases, political remittances have not conformed with the predictions of liberal or
transnationalist theories, neither as long-distance political influence in proportion to
economic flows nor as a one-way north-south transmission.
The following photograph points to the ambiguity of Mexico‘s social, economic
and political transformation within a transnational context. The people in the photo
(mostly women) have travelled from rural (and increasingly semi-suburban) Mixteca
sierra, a poor region in the state of Puebla, to the provincial city of Atlixco; early on a
Monday morning in July, they are waiting in line for the opening of the local financial
transfer branch in order to receive cash remitted days earlier at week‘s end by their family
member in Chicago or Los Angeles; in their attire and standing, they appear to have
escaped poverty if not yet to have attained affluence—evidence consistent with World
Bank research findings that remittances have boosted family incomes and welfare in the
migrant-sending regions. Institutionally, the transmitter agency is a private transnational
corporation—InterMex—not a government welfare agency, state-sponsored bank or
political party.188
188 InterMex is a transnational firm with businesses in money transfer services and telephone call centers
headquartered in Miami, Florida with regional offices in Puebla and Guatemala City The firm was
founded by John and Cesar Rincón and sold in 2007 to Lindsay Goldberg & Bessemer, a private
investment firm in New York. Source: http://www.intermexusa.com/html_11_07/about_history.html.
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Outside the Money Counter, Atlixco, Puebla, July 24, 2006
(Author's photo)
What are the politics of this image? On the one hand, Mexico‘s labor export
economy has perpetuated the dependence of rural, indigenous populations who lack
leverage directly or indirectly over the government. On the other hand, labor export has
transformed the dependence, replacing the PRI party-state with the emigrant husband and
sons as providers. It has also generated new mobility and disposable income for
households within a socioeconomically marginalized segment. To the extent that
dependence continues, it has shifted from state and party to market—a fact that eludes the
state-nationalist view.
Still, politically speaking, something large is missing. The photo could be titled
―National champions: our sons and daughters.‖ It captures the rise of neoliberal marketbased model that prizes individual agency, in which workers are largely alone in a
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globalized labor market, challenged to access and realize economic opportunity through
family and social networks. ―My son, my daughter‖ -- the absence of collective
organization and the debasement of national political community are noteworthy.
Politically, each of the Mexican emigrant workers linked to the women in the photos is
effectively excluded as a citizen – the problem of this dissertation.
This descriptive statement contains the basis of a critique of Mexico‘s democracy,
which annoys the country‘s governing elite focused on altering a U.S.-dominated
migration regime. However, this critique is constructive. My point is not that Mexico has
an entirely bad record on this issue– on the contrary, it has achieved much in advancing
the systematic study of overseas voting administration. Rather, Mexico is caught up in a
much larger problem of realizing national citizenship and expanding democracy under
increasingly globalized economic conditions. As the comparative analysis has shown, the
problem transcends Mexico, a fact evident in the global boom in overseas voting
institutions. The photo could have been taken in the urbanizing areas of every one of the
world‘s continents; the local details and culture would vary greatly, but the basic
economic and political phenomena of labor emigration, new transnational capacities, and
democratization with incomplete citizenship have become generalized.
Should we see overseas voting as a standard or required practice of democracy?
The dissertation has thus far tabled the normative question in its efforts to gain a sound
empirical command of the topic. Political theorists have debated the appropriateness of
overseas voting as a norm for democracies, with some advocating a permissive approach
(Bauböck 2007) in opposition to critics of overseas voting (Rubio-Marín 2006, LópezGuerra 2005). In my view, OV is one among many normal, healthy practices of plural,
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liberal democracy. Nation-states should be expected to choose themselves if OV is
appropriate, and in what format or level of expansiveness, depending upon national
history and experience. Overseas voting is ultimately a political decision of the national
community. It can take on significance as an issue of human rights, national interest and
democratic expansion. With the experiences of many nations still unfolding, restraint is
appropriate. But a flexible consensus may be emerging: OV can be a routine and healthy
institution for democratic polities and their members to arrange, yet each community
must decide for itself whether and how extensively to adopt it.
Civic nationalism presents a problem for liberal theorists of democracy who per
Robert Dahl have considered resident country voting to be the correct solution to migrant
political rights. However, home country ties do not go away-- the grip of national identity
is as powerful as ever-- and resident country rights are not automatic. Rather, longdistance communications technologies, interdependence and the proliferation of power
capacities have generated overlapping authority, multiple membership, and tiered or
partial belonging. Liberal transnationalists argue that long distance participation in the
home country is complementary to participation in the resident country.189 Thus, migrants
should do both, and good things will go together. However, in both Mexico and the
Dominican Republic, this research and that of Ayón (2006) have concluded that
connections between participation rights at home and in the resident country have more
often led to organizational conflicts than to complementarities.
Policy implications
Labor export may be a long-term loser for sending nations, but it has been a
189 Different versions of this argument pervade the transnationalism literature, with prominent examples
including Robert Smith 2006 and Portes et al 2007.
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winner for their politicians. In the Dominican Republic and Mexico, politicians recognize
remittances as a source of social stability, along with the individual political element in
the senders-- the potential opinion makers and voters who retain active ties to their
families, communities and nations of origin. These perceptions have prompted changes in
rhetoric more than in policies. The challenge is to break from ―safety-valve politics,‖ in
which remittances serve electoral politics, to structure extraterritorial politics so that
diaspora participation acts in service of institution-building.
At the international level, the new awareness of economic remittances generated a
burst of policy attention to the question of how to refine labor export. So far, multilateral
development banks have dominated public policy analysis of remittances, isolating the
topic from politics and focusing almost exclusively on the goal of reducing transfer
costs.190 Thus, according to the World Bank, more migration and remittances are
generally desirable, regardless of their social effects, since they enhance efficiency and
incomes in poor countries. Similarly, a recent article has concluded from survey data
analysis that Mexican migrants are ―agents of democratic diffusion‖ for spreading
democratic political attitudes (Pérez-Armendáriz & Crow 2009, 120-1). Findings from
my field work in multiple states and at the national level were not consistent with this
conclusion, tending more toward a refutation of the straightforward liberal diffusion
argument. Similarly the research here and by others found that remittances have had no
such benign effect upon political culture in the Dominican Republic (Gonzalez-Acosta
2008b, 9). The two different cases show much more ambiguous effects of political
remittances upon democratic institutions.
190 See the Inter-American Development Bank report by López-Córdova and Olmedo (2006, 27-30) as an
example.
277
Nevertheless, remittance economies offer a potential site for U.S. and bilateral
foreign policy innovation for the way that they bridge the U.S. and dependent
democratizers. As dual transitions mature in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, the
enormous challenges of building institutions for democratic politics and economic growth
remain as urgent as ever. For the U.S., there is a national interest in better understanding
the dense web of intersocietal relations connecting resident communities in the U.S. to
foreign states in the Americas and beyond. Demonstrating an awareness of these
connections would generate goodwill, open specific areas for cooperation, and help to
revitalize U.S. engagement in the region, with gains for all parties.191 Within the U.S., a
secondary motivation is the possibility that any knowledge, concepts or framing
narratives generated by this study could serve in reorienting discussion on immigration,
whenever the costs of policy failure become sufficiently appreciated to unblock that
issue.
The research in this study repeatedly confirmed the existence of the ―ample
reservoir of civic potential‖ among overseas Mexicans that was originally documented
statistically by McCann et al. Contrary to the elite consensus, a large portion of overseas
Mexicans are eager to participate, while at least an equal portion is turned off from
formal politics. Particularly given the continuing hard-line U.S. stance against
immigration reform, six million face double exclusion – disenfranchisement in both the
host and resident country.
The Dominican case shows that more transnational political activity is not
191 Strong ethical and instrumental grounds support this argument: ethically, the U.S. should consider the
effects of its economic behavior on other nations and seek to exercise power in a morally conscious
and sustainable way; instrumentally, a U.S. leadership transparently conscious of migration
interdependence would generate bandwagon effects likely to enhance U.S. influence in the region, and
so boost security and prosperity.
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necessarily good. Dual citizenship does not automatically lead to win-win synergies and
can often take on zero-sum characteristics due to different interests of home-country
citizens, dual citizens and ethnic U.S. citizens. Differences within the diaspora and the
continuing problem of representation, aggregation and legitimacy point out the splits
between a minority of transnational party-connected activists and the diaspora broader
community.
For Mexico, OV clearly presents a difficult topic given the complicated politics
analyzed here. As stated, the issue is one for Mexicans to decide themselves. There is a
case to be made for overseas voting rights on the grounds of human rights, national
interest, and democratic institution-building. A human rights concern looms large across
the U.S., as the absence of political rights perpetuates exploitation and abusive treatment
by U.S. employers and authorities. As long as the migrant group remains itinerant and
doubly excluded, in the absence of any representative clout, its members will remain
vulnerable to continuing abuse and scapegoating.
Considering Mexico‘s national interest, the fact remains that an extremely
industrious, productive and promising segment of its workforce has left the country,
pointing to a major loss in human resources since long-distance ties will tend to diminish
over time in aggregate. As Robert Smith has stated, Mexico has subsidized U.S.
consumers and employers by raising and educating a significant portion of its youth who
come to work in the U.S. (2006). The subsidy is not limited to primary and secondary
education, but also includes tertiary and graduate training that emigration drains from the
nation‘s economy. A recent study by the International Organization of Migration
estimated that of the 19,000 Mexicans with doctorates, 14,000 live in the U.S., part of the
279
exodus of middle-class and professional segments of recent decades.192
Voting is one sure way that some will use to maintain ties to the homeland, or as
one focus group participant testified in Mexico City in 2006, ―to continue to still feel
Mexican.‖ One younger Mexican politician whom I interviewed worried that the
emigrants would be lost altogether, stating that the first of the two countries to grant
citizenship would win a major coup of devotion and lock in loyalty of an especially
valuable segment.193 Mexican elites do not share his concern that migrant affiliation is
desirable and slipping away. Nor does the US perceive any advantage in making citizens
out of undocumented Mexican migrants. So the double exclusion is rooted in powerful
forces on both sides of the border. Rooted, but perhaps not altogether stuck.
What would it take to change overseas voting institutions in Mexico? Since
Mexico‘s government capacities in the overseas units are not likely to diminish, change
would be most likely to come from a shift in the ideological structure that underpins the
elite consensus against overseas voting. South Korea shows one case in which this
occurred. In such a scenario, it is imaginable that a broader version of transnational
politics could play a constructive role in reshaping the Mexican elite thinking. Gradual
growth in the overseas voting institution could help reduce electoral security concerns. A
shift to more cooperative bilateral and transnational politics could also lead Mexican
politicians to perceive the plural roots of US interests in supporting Mexico‘s overseas
voting. A broader, second-generation Mexican transnational organization would have to
192 Alfredo Corchado. 2008. Immigration: Brain drain threatens Mexico‘s prosperity. Dallas Morning
News, 2 November (accessed 30 March 2010). ―We're permanently losing our best minds and best
hands from both the countryside and the urban centers," said Rodolfo Tuiran, Mexico's education
official and demographer. "These people represent a tremendous potential for Mexico's future
economic development. Their migration needs to be reversed, or Mexico risks its future."
193 Author‘s interview, former Federal Deputy (PRD-Guanajuato) and Undersecretary of Government for
Mexico City, City Hall, Mexico City (18 December 2006).
280
overcome the credibility gap that now exists within the political class. Immigration
reform in the US could change this dynamic, removing the Mexican elite fears of
backlash and galvanizing transnational political entrepreneurs now dispirited by defeat
and double exclusion. Finally, in the event of national crisis in Mexico, or in its wake, the
need for a healthy democratic infusion of civic willingness could generate a new sense of
openness. As Yossi Shain has theorized, diaspora politics typically surge in times of
abnormality, when pivotal events of national formation or crisis awaken the willing
participation of the diaspora (2007). Possibly Mexico is entering such a cycle, as growing
drug warfare risks a crisis of state.
In contrast to Mexico‘s multiple potential scenarios, the Dominican case shows a
clear tension between two major tendencies of, on the one hand, transnational consular
patronage within an ineffective and increasingly vulnerable home-country regime and, on
the other hand, a move to incorporation politics within the U.S. The fact that
approximately 70% of overseas Dominicans enjoy legal residence in the resident country
affects the future outlook for overseas voting. The expansive regime appears robust, but
its long-term growth will likely moderate, while greater political momentum mounts
behind resident country incorporation. For example, in 2009, a coordinated campaign
among Dominican-American activists was focused on the U.S. decennial Census –
showing clearly where the orientation of a major segment of the overseas population lies.
The transnational politics will continue, rooted in the continuing expansion of overseas
politics that most recently took the form of designated diaspora Congressional districts.194
However, overseas politics will face the same difficulties confronting the domestic
194 Pedro Germosen. 2009. Finjus advierte la Constitución quedaría petrificada en tiempo. Hoy, Santo
Domingo, 5 September.
281
regime in the form of a perilous economic situation and weak governing structure.
Looking ahead
The overseas voting trend documented in chapter two (Table 2.0) continues to
evolve in today‘s world politics. Following the explosive growth in formal adoption
between 1991 and 2005, today‘s movements to accessible implementation continue more
slowly but are more significant politically. By no means should we assume that reversals
are not possible, but the global OV trend has sturdy supports in the dispersion of
communications technology, the continuing importance of migration for economic
growth nationally and worldwide, and the centrality of democracy as an organizing
principle for national politics.
Political remittance effects are occurring in the home country at the national level.
But voting rules structure participation, and more broadly, overseas state characteristics
structure transnational politics. The foreign ministry and the electoral commission
together administer the overseas spaces, police external political activities, embody
national understandings of diaspora that frame domestic debates, and control the
implementation of overseas voting. Beyond their direct effects, their capacities and values
in these regards work to structure the incentives facing legislators, who calculate the
impact of prospective overseas voting accordingly.
As an instance of world politics in transformation, overseas voting connects to
and reflects the powerful forces of technological linkages, democracy-rights norms, and
deepening labor interdependence. Overseas politics contains many potential germs of
significant entrepreneurship since as a space it attracts individuals who can mark and
define polities and their relations with one another. Mark Blythe has pointed out the
282
importance of one-time, large-scale events in political economy – single cases of outsized
importance that are altogether off of the normal curve (2006, 493). Interestingly, the
human agents behind many such events have been great leaders marked by overseas
experience; in the 20th century, among those to emerge from the millions of solders,
traveling students, migrant laborers and émigrés to mark world history were Deng
Xiaoping, Ho Chi Minh, Gandhi, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Sayyid Qutb.
This is not to overstate overseas voting‘s importance, but merely to suggest that it
is a good site to look for potential sources of significant future trends in world politics.
Today‘s global population of migrants – laborers and soldiers, elites and intellectuals,
journeymen of all stripes – is only 3% of world population. But it is an outsized pool of
carriers of political resources. Given the broad expansion of access to political capacities
– what Thomas Friedman has labeled the ―democratization of globalization‖ – we can
anticipate that a larger portion of the world‘s migrants will mark international relations in
the 21st century than in prior eras. As the dissertation suggests, by looking at the overseas
state, analysts will be able to gain a reliable sense rather quickly, in any given case, about
which migrants are likely to have an impact and in what possible ways.
283
Appendix I – A
Terminological Glossary
Diaspora: according to Gabriel Sheffer, (2003, i-v), ―a social-political formation created
as a result of either voluntary or forced migration, whose members regard themselves as
the same ethno-national origin and who permanently reside as minorities in one of
several host countries. Members of such entities maintain regular or occasional contacts
with what they regard as their homelands and with individuals and groups of the same
background residing in other host countries.‖ Sheffer's definition is oriented to
contemporary world politics, and he also emphasizes the triangular relationship between
diaspora, home country and resident country.
Similarly, this study's usage of diaspora is concerned with the formal relationship
between overseas nationals and the home state. I operationalize diaspora to refer to the
population of overseas nationals residing outside of the home country, whether or not
they take on a second nationality by naturalizing in the resident country. This helps to
resolve a concrete problem pointed out by the quantitative analysis, which is the task of
approximating the population of various diasporas. The usage here differs from cultural
and historiographical conceptions of the term, which focus upon the sociological
conditions and subjectivities of collective identities that endure outside of a homeland.
Those who do not actively maintain a home country citizenship, as well as second and
third generation ethnic nationals, are not potential political actors even in countries with
overseas voting rules, unless they re-naturalize.
It is possible to distinguish between an ancient or classical version of diaspora, a
historical version, and a contemporary one. In the historical definition, group membership
is open to any group or individual outside the national territory who so identifies. Robin
Cohen (1995) identifies core characteristics of diasporas associated with the traditional
historiographical usage, which permits a more ample, descriptive definition of diaspora:
dispersal from an original homeland to two or more foreign regions, often traumatic;
alternatively the expansion from a homeland for economic objectives; a collective
memory and myth about the homeland, as well as an idealized passion for its safety and
prosperity; a return movement; ethnic group consciousness over time; troubled
relationship with the resident societies; a sense of empathy with co-ethnic members in
other countries of residence; the possibility of a distinctive yet enriching life in residence
countries that have a tolerance for pluralism.
These characteristics point out the historical roots of the phenomenon, but are not
essential to the contemporary meaning of diaspora politics. The etymology of the term is
based upon ancient Greek, speiro ―to sow,‖ and dia ―over,‖ with original references in the
Old Testament (Deuteronomy, 28:25) and in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian
War (II, 27). The term's meaning varies depending upon the time period in question, and
in this sense it continues to evolve amidst the context of contemporary world politics.
Diaspora politics down: diaspora political activities that aim to influence home country
domestic politics but originate outside of the territorial polity.
Diaspora politics up: diaspora political activities that aim to influence foreign entities,
including the resident country polity, transnational civil society groups, global policy
284
networks, bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, and formal international institutions.
Expatriates: national citizens and nationals of a country who reside outside of the home
country territory.
External voting (voto en el exterior): see overseas voting.
Extraterritorial: beyond or outside of a nation-state's territorially-bound sovereignty.
Also: overseas, abroad, external, exterior.
Global nation: a national political community spanning domestic state and society and
including a significant diaspora population, that is economically and demographically
significant, committed to overseas citizenship in the home country, with active civic and
state-linked collective organizations.
Home country: the nation-state of origin (birth) and original nationality of the migrant,
synonymous with the homeland state, as opposed to the resident country. I use the term
and its antonym resident country since they identify the terms of political membership
relations between the migrant and the particular state, i.e. the nationality of the migrant.
The commonly used terms of ―sending country‖ and ―receiving country‖ are misleading
in two regards, in my view. First, these other terms eliminate the individual human
agency behind contemporary migration since they suggest that states actively send
migrants. Secondly, they suggest that migration consists of finite one-way movements,
and they obscure the analytic distinction between human flows and related but separate
flows of remittances, goods, ideas, etc.
Host country: see resident country.
Labor export: cross-border labor emigration, with net human outflows and
corresponding remittance inflows on a mass scale, whether home states are active or
passive. The contemporary version in Latin America tends to occur through market
mechanisms in conjunction with neoliberal economic policies, usually without active
state management or coordination. In other regions or time periods, however, it may be
state-managed to greater or lesser degrees.
Overseas voting (voto en el extranjero, voto ultramar): suffrage emanating from
outside of the national territory. Also referred to as external voting, exterior voting, voting
abroad.
Political remittances: the transfer of political resources for influence in the home
country by expatriates, i.e. political actions undertaken outside of the territory to affect
the national polity.
Polity: the political system of a collectivity including formal institutions and a shared
identity with rules for participation and belonging.
285
Remittances: private cross-border financial transfers at the household level.
Sending country: see Home country.
Receiving country: see Resident country.
Resident country: country of residence of the migrant, as opposed to the home country.
Alternatively referred to in other studies as the ―receiving‖ or ―destination‖ country.
Territoriality: the international legal convention that assigns governing sovereignty on
the basis of control over distinct physically demarcated spaces.
Transnational: of or relating to activities or relationships across nation-state borders that
involve one or more non-state actor.
Transnational political entrepreneurs: individuals who engage in diaspora politics with
the intent of influencing national domestic or foreign policy of the home country, whether
via overseas party politics, extraterritorial state-building, or activism in global policy
networks.
Transnationalist: of the body of interdisciplinary research including especially
anthropology and sociology of recent decades that focuses on transnational life,
commonly associated with the work of Alejandro Portes, Nina Glick Schiller, Peggy
Levitt and Luis Guarnizo, among others.
286
Appendix I – B : Chronology
Instituting Overseas Voting (OV): A Two-step Process
Conjuncture
Legislation
Implementation
Open overseas voting
OV law
DR
2004 ---->
DR
1997
Democratization,
neoliberalism
DR
1994
Restrictive overseas voting
M
2005, 2006 ---->
M
1996
No OV law
No overseas voting
287
288
Appendix I – D
Top 50 States by Expatriates, 2004
Source: UN Population Division
289
Appendix II - A
Time-series (1970-2004): Overseas Voting Law
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
1.
Political openness 0.2001 ***
(0.0327)
0.2239 ***
(0.0342)
0.1997 ***
(0.0326)
2.
Regime age
(0.0173) **
(0.0074)
--
0.0171 **
(0.0074)
3.
Overseas citizens
population, est.
--
-4.59e-08
(1.64e-07)
--
4.
Percent of citizens 7.349 **
overseas, est.
(3.093)
--
7.357 **
(3.103)
5.
National
population
-8.64e-09 ***
(3.17e-09)
--
-8.55e-09 ***
3.13e-09
6.
Remittances
6.12e-10 ***
(1.63e-10)
4.33e-10 ***
(1.44e-10)
(6.08e-10) ***
1.61e-10
7.
Remittances/GDP --
-0.0091
(0.0287)
--
8.
GDP
1.24e-12 **
(5.51e-13)
--
1.24e-12 **
(5.51e-13)
9.
Post-conflict
occupation
--
--
-0.4745
(1.906)
constant
-3.158 ***
(0.4030)
-2.247 ***
(0.3445)
-3.138 ***
(0.3995)
Number of groups 130
129
130
Number of
observations
653
647
653
Obs per group,
avg (min, max)
5.8
(1, 8)
5.0
(1, 8)
5.0
(1, 8)
lnsig2u
1.968
(0.177)
1.940
(0.185 )
1.965
(0.176)
sigma_u
2.675
(0.236)
2.638
(0.244)
2.671
(0.235)
Rho
0.685
(0.038)
0.679
(0.040)
0.684
(0.0379)
Log likelihood
-263.31
-275.95
-263.31
chibar2(01)
188.37
187.80
188.24
*p<0.1; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01.
290
Appendix II - B
Time-series (1970-2004): Open implementation
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
1.
Political openness 0.198 ***
(0.054)
0.201***
(0.057)
--
2.
Regime age
0.0174 *
(0.009)
0.038 ***
(0.007)
3.
Overseas citizens, -6.41e-07 **
estimated
(3.28e-07)
-7.54e-07 **
(3.60e-07)
--
4.
Percent of citizens -overseas, est.
3.72
(5.33)
3.11
(3.836)
5.
National
population
-4.67e-08 ***
(1.67e-08)
-4.10e-08 ***
(1.70e-08)
--
6.
Remittances
9.60e-10 ***
(2.00e-10)
9.81e-10 ***
(2.08e-10)
--
7.
Remittances/GDP --
-0.007
(0.056)
0.003
(0.0389)
8.
GDP
1.84e-12 ***
(5.51e-13)
1.74e-12 ***
(5.37e-13)
--
9.
Post-conflict
occupation
--
2.058
(1.79)
1.52
1.703
constant
-4.627 ***
(0.595)
-4.975 ***
(0.709)
-4.63 ***
(0.450)
Number of groups 130
129
130
Number of
observations
653
647
652
Obs per group,
avg (min, max)
5.0
(1, 8)
5.0
(1, 8)
5.0
(1, 8)
lnsig2u
1.739
(0.2139)
1.720
(0.2127)
1.803
(0.1891)
sigma_u
2.386
(0.2552)
2.363
(0.2513)
2.463
(0.2328)
Rho
0.634
(0.0497)
0.629
(0.0496)
0.648
(0.0431 )
Log likelihood
-149.48
-148.42
-185.80
chibar2(01)
75.95
75.23
121.91
0.062 *
(0.009)
*p<0.1; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01.
291
Appendix II - C
Heckman selection model, 2000 and 2004
Probit model:
Voting law only
# Observations
254
Outcome Variable Voting Law (stage 1)
Heckman probit:
Implementation and Selection
censored: 109 (no voting law)
uncensored: 145
Open implementation (stage 2)
1.
Political openness
0.084*** (0.002)
0.101 ***
(0.036)
2.
Regime age
0.002
0.005
(0.004)
3.
Expatriates
2.66 e-07** (1.17 e-07)
-2.02 e-07 * (1.10 e-07)
4.
Population
-2.85 e-09** (1.37 e-09)
-2.34 e-09*** (7.22 e-10)
5.
Expatriates % of
population
0.416
(1.092)
-0.035
6.
Remittances
5.09e-11
(8.56e-11)
1.41 e-10 ** (7.06 e-11)
7.
GDP
4.25 e-13 (4.24 e-13)
1.72 e-13
(1.29 e-13)
8.
Remittance
dependency
-0.032 *
(0.019)
-0.022
(0.026)
9.
Post-conflict
intervention
-0.342
(0.642)
-9.753
Constant
-0.484 *** (0.175)
Pseudo-R2
0.2124
(0.004)
-0.772 **
-137.61
Rho
Wald
*p<0.1; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01.
(0.307)
Selection equation (Stage 1 outcome)
Voting law
3.979 *** (0.443)
Political
openness
0.014
Expatriates
-1.89 e-07 (2.47 e-07)
Population
-2.05 e-09 (3.26 e-09)
(0.029)
Remittance
dependency
0.005
GDP
2.35 e-14 5.10 e-13
Constant
Log likelihood
(1.623)
-1.777
(0.036)
(0.297) ***
-102.51
-1.000 (0.000)
chi2( 6) = 46.76; prob>chi2 = 0.000
292
Appendix II -D
Description of variables, indicators and data sources
Dependent Variable(s) -- Overseas voting (OV) rules at 5-year intervals, 1970-2005, in
two sequential and related characteristics
1. LAW (in constitution or statute) establishing right and authority for overseas voting
2. OPEN: VE Institution is open, accessible to massive overseas citizen participation.
See below for specific criteria determining the evaluation and coding of country-year
cases.
Independent Variables
1. POLITY2 Home-country Political openness -- Polity 2
2. REGIME AGE
Total years to date of home-country Regime at Time T
3. EXPATS Estimated overseas population based on emigrant population at Time T
4. POP
National population at Time T
5. EX/POP Percentage of national population residing overseas
6. R$
Total annual recorded remittances at Time T
7. GDP
Gross Domestic Productive
8. R$/GDP Percentage share of GDP from recorded remittances
9. PC_OCC Post-conflict occupation and international intervention by UN or US or
western states
Panel Time-series: Country-year at five-year intervals: e.g. 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985,
1990, 1995, 2000, 2004
The time-series analysis covered 130 countries with more than 1 million in
population in 2005, which accounted for over 9% of the global population: Albania,
Algeria, Argentina, Armenia , Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus,
Belgium, Benin, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina
Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile, China, Colombia, Congo (Democratic Republic),
Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican
Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France,
Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau,
Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy,
Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Korea, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvia, Lebanon,
Lesotho, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania,
Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia,
Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman , Pakistan,
Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania,
Russian, Rwanda, Senegal, Serbia and Montenegro, Sierra Leone, Slovak Republic,
Slovenia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Swaziland, Sweden,
Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia,
Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan,
Venezuela, Vietnam, West Bank and Gaza, Yemen, Zimbabwe.
293
For twenty of the top 150 countries in population in 2005, there was no remittance data
available for any of the time periods. Therefore the model was run on the 130 countries
for which the data existed. The 20 omitted countries contained a total population of
approximately 313 million in 2005, According to World Bank data, a sum equal to only
5% of global population of 6.4 billion. The dropped countries come from all regions and
exhibit variance in other key characteristics such as income, so the risk of bias resulting
from the omitted panel series cases appears minor.
The twenty countries omitted were: Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Canada, Central
African Republic, Chad, Congo (Democratic Republic), Cuba, Iraq, Kuwait, Liberia,
North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Somalia, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates,
Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Zambia.
Dependent Variables, Criteria for Coding
1. VE_L
overseas voting,
No or Yes
LAW (in constitution or statute) establishing right and authority for
0 or 1
Test 1: there exists explicit law(s) that establish the right of citizens to vote
overseas AND the authority of the electoral agency to conduct such elections.
Test 2: there are no legal grounds, i.e. missing legislation, prohibiting or
preventing the national electoral agency to organize overseas voting.
Background: The analytic focus on overseas voting properly begins with the legal
foundations of a state's electoral institutions. Modern elections require laws and state
electoral authorities, and so citizens voting activities cannot precede the existence of
explicit legal-bureaucratic electoral institution. Electoral institutions structure citizens'
participation in voting, whether these institutions are controlled by the government or
autonomous units established as civic organizations. The reality of electoral institutions
similarly encompasses voting whether it occurs inside or outside of the national territory,
but especially in the latter case. A counterfactual case of a pure citizens' election can be
seen in the exercise of Mexican expatriate voting between 1988 and 2000, in the mock
elections organized by expatriate Mexican activists in Chicago and Los Angeles.
Important as these exercises may have been for the purposes of organizing migrants and
calling attention to their claims, the votes did not count since they lacked a legalinstitutional basis in the Mexican polity.
Most states conventionally establish the right to vote in the constitution, explicitly
or implicitly. Usually, but not always, a legislative statute confirms and/or elaborates this
right of citizens and authorizes the national electoral body to organize overseas voting to
realize this right for citizens. In some cases, constitutional law as originally written or as
amended has been sufficient to establish the right and authorize overseas electoral
procedures.
294
2. OPEN Implementation: Access to VoE Institution is open or restricted/closed
No or Yes
0 or 1
who is eligible to vote
citizenship, residency, registration
other limitations, restrictions: length of stay
what means of voting
postal, embassies, polls
locations of voting
embassies, polls, public spaces
support of state
managed by embassies, by electoral agency
closed institutions
target government employees (embassies) only
limit locations, means of voting
require difficult paperwork, registration process
result in minimal participation
criteria for openness target all overseas citizens
take place in multiple locations, outside of consulates
mixed procedures -- different options
services that facilitate citizens' registration
result in generally higher participation
i.e. > 1-2% of overseas potential voters
> 30,000-50,000 votes
establish a special legislative district for expat citizens
establish directly elected expat representative in national legislature
An example of the coding process is seen in Table 2.1, which shows Argentina and
Portugal and the key features of their overseas voting rules in the most recent time period.
Table
Examples of coding decisions for Implementation -- Overseas voting
rules
Key Features
Overall tendency
Coding
Argentina,
2004
Registration available abroad;
regulation by electoral authority;
consular voting only;
extensive deadlines, documentation
Restrictive in effect due to
registration procedures, despite
some open characteristics.
Source: Chavez Ramos, 571-2.
Portugal, 2004 mixed procedures for registration
Clearly open.
and voting; diaspora representation Source: Calderón, 582-3.
Sources:
Ellis, Navarro et al, eds., IDEA Handbook, 2007.
CESOP, 2003.
Navarro and Morales, 2006.
Navarro, Comparative Overview, 2003.
0
1
295
Appendix II-E
Basis for citizen diaspora estimates (Expatriate citizens)
To construct overseas citizen population estimates by country at five-year intervals, I
created a simple model using country data from the UN Population division. In a second
refinement to the estimates, I have incorporated new more precise estimates from the
University of Sussex (UK) migration research center. My original simple model
combines net migration flow data with international migrant stock data provided by
country back to 1960.
I checked the numbers against commonly accepted benchmark diaspora counts of i)
known national totals and ii) global estimates for the migrant population, making
demographic assumptions about countries' 1960 base levels and diaspora growth rates as
necessary to stay close to commonly accepted benchmarks. Thus, my original equation
produced adequate numbers for Mexico and for the Dominican Republic in relation to
known estimates, as it did for dozens of other countries.
A more problematic assumption that I do not make is that the U.N. data is reliable as the
basis for accurately quantifying distinct populations of overseas nationals. The U.N. data
is problematic since it is based on national data that contains much undercounting of
human migration, according to Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute, whom I
consulted in July. I avoid this issue by labeling this factor throughout the paper as
expatriate population estimates.
The country-year data for migration estimates used in the selection model in this chapter
draft have been wholly revised, utilizing the newly available Sussex database. This
dataset presents estimated migrant population stocks by country of origin for the year
2000, breaking down each population by country of residence, using UN Population
Division figures and different government and multilateral migrant classification
schemes. See Parsons' et al (2007).
The method that I utilized for incorporating this new source was to first compare it to my
original estimates used in the time-series models, then to revise estimates using Sussex
and UN data as appropriate, often taking the average of the two figures in the case of
discrepancies. It was reassuring to find that the average difference between my original
estimates of citizen diaspora and those generated from Sussex data was less than 0.5%.
My original model resulted in a global sum across all countries for the year 2004 of
approximately 210 million overseas citizens; the Sussex data resulted in a global total
sum for the year 2000 of 172 million. Both figures are reasonably close to the UN
estimate for 2005 of approximately 191 million.
Equation and assumptions for original time-series estimates (1970 - 2004)
The rest of the appendix details assumptions and calculations underlying my original
estimates.
1. I used country data from UN Population Division: Net Migration and International
Migrant Stock, combining flow data with stock data to generate five-year estimated flows
296
for each country:
i) Net migration = Immigration minus emigration (both citizens and non-citizens)
(Positive net migration figure indicates:
(Negative net migration figure indicates:
immigration country for the period)
emigration country for the period)
ii) International migration stock
= immigrants at time T, the number of people born
in a country other than that in which they live. It also includes refugees.
Formula =
- ( Net Migration figure, five year periodT-5 to T )
+ Change in International Migrant Stock[T - (T-5)]
2. I established a 1960 base year diaspora population using the following assumptions
and techniques:
i. Overseas citizens set at 1% of national population in 1960, and adjusted as
documented.
ii. Overseas citizens base adjusted in some cases to grow at 1% or 2% annually
independent of net emigration figures, consistent with known facts, e.g. Mexico
-- positive balance of factors: non-recorded emigration outstripping deaths,
naturalizations
iii. in large immigration countries where numbers generated negative diaspora results, I
made two adjustments:
i) set 1960 base figure for Overseas Citizens at higher percentage of population, up to 8
or 9%
ii) adjusted equation of 5-year Emigration to include naturalizations and increase change
in immigration by a 1 - 2% annual rate
Net migration = net immigration minus net emigration
Net migration should equal immigrants in minus immigrants naturalized minus
immigrants repatriated minus immigrants dying minus emigrants out minus emigrants
returning minus emigrants dying.
Some discrepancies in large industrial countries result in repeated negative values for
five-year flows and suggest double counting of immigrants, or failure to count
naturalizations, repatriations in stock changes.
3. Use following formula to calculate diaspora estimate at five year intervals:
EXPATS at T = Diaspora(T-5) +/- 5-year net change in emigrant population
where 5-year net change in emigrant population
=
- ( Net Migration ) + Change in International Migrant Stock
=
- ( five-year net migration total ) + [Immigration stock(T) - immigration stock(T5)]
or in other words
=
- (Immigration - Emigration) + Change in Immigration
Net migration = Immigration minus emigration
(both citizens and non-citizens)
297
(Positive net migration figure indicates:
(Negative net migration figure indicates:
immigration country for the period)
emigration country for the period)
4. Compare Sussex UN figures for country emigrant population on the year 2000 to
standing UN data. Integrate Sussex data as appropriate based on evidence of relative
accuracy..
and so direct qualitative case studies in search of causal mechanisms.
Appendix III – A
Consular patronage system
President
Financial and
political support
Foreign
nd
Ministry
al a pport
i
c
an su
Fin tical
li
po
Consul
Offbudget
funds
Consulates
National
Firms
Home
country
Political
parties
JCE
Electoral
authority
Guidelines,
personnel
JCE Overseas
Office for Registration
fees
documents,
access
voter
outreach
Local appointees
Political
candidate visits
campaign
donations
Overseas
party affiliates
Managers,
Formal & informal rules
Emigrants
Domestic
society
Remittances
298
jobs,
prestige
jobs,
prestige
Diaspora
society
Appendix III – B
Capital city residents among Mexican overseas voters
299
300
References -- Author's Interviews
Date
02-24
05-03
05-03
06-13
Interviewee -- 2006 Interviews -- MEXICO
Prof. Jerónimo Cortina, Columbia University, Department of Political Science
Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, CSIS, Washington, DC
Former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Washington, DC
PAN Candidate for Federal Deputy, 5th Federal District, Puebla (elected on
7/02/06)
06-14 PAN Representative, IFE, 5th Federal District Committee
07-13 Electoral Counselor, Puebla State Electoral Institute
07-17 President, PRI State Committee of Puebla
07-21 Professor of Law, University of Puebla (PRD)
07-24 Genl. Secretary for Administration, Huaquechula Mayor (PAN)
07-24 Municipal President (mayor) of Tochimilco, Puebla (PRI)
7/26-27, 8/18 Electoral Counselor (PRD), Coalition of Democratic, Urban and
Campesino Organizations
7/26, 8/9 Councilman, Acatlán, and Advisor to Migrants (PRD)
07-27 Profesor, Yáonahuac, Sierra Norte, and PRD activist
07-28 Director, Fundación Colosio (PRI), former Puebla rep. to the CMPE (the federal
Commission for the Protection of Mexicans Abroad)
07-28 Director and Counselor, Fraternity of Migrants in the American Union and
Canada (PRD)
08-07 Legal Counsel, State Commission for Attention to the Pueblan Migrant (PRI)
08-08 Inter-Institutional Liaison, National Institute of Migration (PAN)
08-09 President, International Confederation of Mexicans Abroad (CIME) - Acatlán,
Puebla
08-09 General Secretary, Intl. Confederation of Mexicans Abroad (CIME)
08-10 Director, State Commission for Attention to the Pueblan Migrant (PRI)
08-11 Federal Agent, National Institute of Migration (INM)
08-11 Researcher, National Institute of Migration (INM)
08-11 Sociologist, Autonomous University of Puebla
08-11 Political Counselor, PAN Puebla State Committee
08-12 Municipal President, Zacapala, Puebla (PAN)
08-18 Journalist (politics and government), El Sol de Puebla
08-18 Sociologist, Autonomous University of Puebla
08-18 Secretary for Campesino and Migrant Groups, PRD Puebla State Committee
08-21 IFE Executive Director, State of Puebla
08-22 Special Secretary, Atlixco Municipal Presidency (PAN)
08-22 Personal Assistant to the Special Secretary, Atlixco Municipal Presidency (PAN)
08-22 Federal Representative for Atlixco Puebla (PAN), Candidate to be for President of
the Atlixco PAN Committee
08-22 Council of Advisors to the Governor, former CEAMP Director (PRI)
08-22 Taxi Driver, Former Migrant employed for ex NJ Governor T.Kean in Rumson,
NJ
08-22 Director, Local NGO
301
08-22
08-14
09-08
09-08
09-08
09-08
09-08
09-08
09-08
09-10
09-11
09-13
09-19
09-25
09-25
09-26
09-26
09-26
09-26
09-26
09-27
09-27
09-27
09-28
09-28
09-29
09-29
10-03
10-04
10-04
10-10
10-12
10-16
10-27
10-30
10-31
11-06
11-09
11-09
11-16
11-16
11-17
11-29
11-30
Periodista, La Intolerancia, Puebla
Coordinator for Overseas Mexicans, PAN Executive National Council
Secretary for International Relations, PRD-CEN
Subsecretary for International Politics, PRD-CEN
PRD – CEN, former liaison to migrants
Director, Chicago Grupo Aztlán
Los Angeles PRD Committee director , E. Texas Committee
Valle Imperial, PRD Committee, Baja – CA
Secretary for Migrants (PRD)
Local activist, Redes Ciudadanas and Puebla PRD coalition's Socialist Current in
2006
IFE Coordinador del Voto en el Extranjero
Director of Political Studies, Fundación Rafael Preciado (PAN)
Investigadora, Instituto Mora y Autor, Votar en la Distancia
Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas
Instituto Electoral del Estado de Zacatecas, Asesor al Presidente
PRD, Presidente del Comité Ejecutivo del Estado de Zacatecas
Asesor a la Gobernadora, Director, Instituto Estatal de Migración
Vice President, PRI Comité Estatal
Asesor Jurídico-Político al Presidente del Partido PRI
Professor and Director, Universidad Aut. de Zacatecas, Estudios de Desarrollo
PAN, Secretario General al Pres. del Com. Estatal Zacatecas
Diputado al Congreso estatal por plurinominal, PRD, Zacatecas
Profesor Visitante y Experto en transnacionalismo, Universidad de Zacatecas
Director, MX Sin Fronteras, Ex director Coalición DPME (by telephone)
Ex Representative, Zacatecas Federation of Clubs in Southern California
Diputado al Congreso por plurinominal, PRI
Profesor, Director de Estudios Internacionales, UAZ, UAED
IME Focus Groups, Mexico City
IME Focus Groups, Mexico City
Consejero, IME, Palm Springs, CA – Michoacán
Director Ejecutivo, Instituto de los Ms en el Exterior
Consejero Electoral, Instituto Federal Electoral
Rep. en Mexico, CDPME
Presidente, Federación de Clubes Poblanos de CA del SUR
Diputado Federal, PRD, ex Senador, Comisión Puntos Constitucionales
Asesor, IFE COVE
Senadora, PAN-Estado de México, Comité de Relaciones Internacionales
Diputado, Presidente, Comisión de Población, Migración
Secretario Técnico, Comisión de Población, Migración
ex Consejero Presidente, IFE
ex Canciller de Relaciones Exteriores
Director de Estudios Electorales Internacionales
Profesor, ex funcionario de carrera del SRE
Sec. Nacional de Doctrina y Formación, PAN
302
12-04
12-07
12-13
12-18
Actor working group, ITAM Center for Interamerican Studies and Program
Profesor ITAM, Departamento de Derecho, y Columnista, Reforma
Diputado Federal, PAN, Jalisco D-18, Com. Población etc.
ex-Federal Deputy, PRD, Undersecretary of Government for Mexico City
Selected Conferences & Workshops -- MEXICO
Date Event
9/25-26 UNAM Seminar on the 2006 election, ―2 de Julio: Reflexiones y Perspectivas,‖
Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Seminario ―Procesos Políticos y
Procesos Electorales,‖ Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico City.
9/29
Analysis of Second State of the State of Zacatecas (Análisis del 2o Informe de
Gobierno), State Legislature, Zacatecas, Zacatecas
10/3-4
Focus Groups with Mexican civic activists in the United States, "Enfoque
México," sponsored by ITAM-CEPI and the Institute of Mexicans in the Exterior,
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mexico City.
10/17-20 42nd Briefing Day (Jornada Informativa), a 4-day program for Journalists and
Spanish-speaking Media Professionals in the US and Canada, Institute of
Mexicans in the Exterior (IME), Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mexico City.
10/27-28 Consejo de Federaciones Mexicanas en Norteamérica (COFEM), 1st National
Convention: Dialogue Without Borders, Los Angeles Convention Center, 2006.
303
References -- Interviews
Date Interviewee – Dominican Republic -- 2007
5/8
Former Dominican Republic Sr. Country Officer (2000-2005), World Bank DR
and Haiti unit.
5/17 Auxiliary Consul, Dominican Consulate in Boston. Local activist, PLD New
England.
5/23 Research Director and Professor of Education and Public Policy, INTEC.
5/24 Director, Global Foundation for Development and Democracy.
5/25 Research Director and Advisor to the President's Consultative Councils for the
Dominican Diaspora, Fundación Global.
6/1
Director of the Office of the Overseas Vote, Central Electoral Board.
6/1
Legal Clerk for Senior Magistrate, Administrative Panel, Central Electoral Board.
6/1
Titular Judge, Administrative Panel, Central Electoral Board
6/4
Prominent investigative journalist, author, and co-founder of Participación
Ciudadana.
6/6
Executive Director, Participación Ciudadana.
6/13 Senior Program Officer for Human Development, World Bank DR.
6/23 Representative and New England Region Director, Central Electoral Board.
6/27 Political scientist, SUNY-Albany.
7/1
Senator, Senate of the Dominican Republic, Montecristi province.
7/10 Political scientist and investigator, Directorate of Investigation and Analysis,
Executive office of the Presidency
7/13 Political scientist, expert in Dominican politics, Temple Univ.; Columnist,
Periódico Hoy
7/13 Fulbright anthropologist investigating environmental initiatives in cacao industry
7/18 Urban planner and director of environmental analysis, Planning Office of the City
Government of La Vega, Dominican Republic.
7/24 General Secretary of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD)
7/25 Policy analyst, Migration Policy Institute.
7/26 Ambassador of the Dominican Republic to the United States.
7/27 Historian of Dominican foreign relations, former Dominican Central Bank
Governor and former Dominican Ambassador to the U.S.
7/30 Local political director, La Vega, PRD.
7/30 La Vega City Councilman and PRD Sec. for Organization
7/30 Secretary General and Campaign Director, La Vega PRD Municipal Committee.
8/1
Associated Press Correspondent for the DR
8/2
Congresswoman (Deputy), Chamber of Deputies, National Congress
8/2
Congresswoman (Deputy), PLD-Santo Domingo, Chamber of Deputies, National
Congress
8/2
Congressman (Deputy, PRD-HOMETOWN???) and Chair, Commission for
Overseas Dominicans, Chamber of Deputies, National Congress
8/2
Analyst, Central Bank, International Division
8/6
City Councilman (PRSC), City of La Vega
8/6
City Councilman (PRSC), City of La Vega
304
8/6
8/7
8/13
8/14
8/14
8/15
8/22
8/23
8/23
8/23
8/24
9/21
Union representative and political director (PRSC), City of La Vega
CEO, Quisqeyana Inc. (leading remittances agency)
Journalist (political parties), newspaper Hoy
Chief Compliance Officer, Vimenca (top remittances agency)
Country Operations Officer, Vimenca (top remittances agency)
Political sociologist, Director General, Center for Research and Social Studies,
UNIBE
Senator and PLD Secretary General for the Province of La Vega
Head of Chancellery, Mexican Embassy in the Dominican Republic
Deputy, Parliament for Central America and Secretary General, PLD Committee
for City of La Vega
City Councilman (PLD), La Vega
Sociologist, Consultant to FLACSO-DR, Director of Survey Research Firm
former Vice President and Executive Director, Dominican American National
Roundtable
Selected Conferences & Workshops – DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Date Event
2007
6/3
Estudios Políticos Contemporáneos, Curso V: Partidos y Sistemas de partidos:
Europa y América Latina, mini-course co-sponsored by Fundación Global de
Democracía y Desarrollo (FUNGLODE) and Sciences-Po, Santo Domingo
7/29
Meetings of the Commission on Dominicans in the Exterior, Cámara de
Diputados, Special invitee of the Chairman, Dip. Rafael Francisco Vasquez, Santo
Domingo, National Congress
8/9
Closing of the Summer Program of International Student Exchange, InteRDom,
sponsored by the Funglode and Universidad Iberoamericana (UNIBE), Santo
Domingo
9/18-20 Fifteenth annual Semana Dominicana, New York and Washington, DC
9/18 Panel on Constitutional Reform, Sponsored by the Fundación Global de
Democracía y Desarrollo and the Inter-American Dialogue, and the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), at CSIS, Washington, DC
2008
10/11/2008 11th Annual Meeting: Communities at Work, Dominican-American
National Roundtable (DANR), The Westin Hotel, Providence, RI
305
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