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When are emigrants really enfranchised? Lengthy lags exist between some reforms that de jure introduced external voting and their application. In the blooming literature on emigrant enfranchisement, these lags remain unexplained. We argue that this hampers our understanding of enfranchisement processes as having different legal and political stages. With data on Latin American and Caribbean states since 1965 until the present, we investigate why some states in this region have delayed the regulation and application of external franchise while others have implemented it right after enactment. We propose hypotheses to understand these reforms as episodes marked by different contexts, engineered by different agent coalitions and embedded into larger processes of political change. In particular, we suggest that enfranchisement processes are composed of three stages: enactment, regulation, and first application. Our findings suggest that the process of adoption of external voting is shaped by the legal mechanism of enactment and the stability of political coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanations of why migrants return to their countries of origin tend to focus on micro and macro level factors: from viewing the move as an individual choice (e.g. neoclassical economics) or a household strategy (e.g. new economics of labor migration), to seeing it as determined by the structural conditions of receiving or sending countries (e.g. economic cycles, wage differentials, etc.). Yet we know very little about how states of origin combine their policies towards emigrants to establish economic links with them, from remittances to return. Using an original dataset for LAC countries, we provide an initial descriptive panorama that highlights the choices that states make in this regard. We compare return policies to other economic policies geared to emigrants. This allows detecting of return policies, which are often neglected in comparative diaspora policy studies, and are one of several developed by states as part of their economic strategies. Furthermore, this first attempt at descriptive analysis provides further paths to explore the causal links behind diaspora policy development within the realm of economic policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX), an index that summarizes the emigrant policies developed by 22 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) states. In recent decades sending states have increasingly adopted policies to keep economic, political or social links with their emigrants. These “emigrant policies” vary in scope and nature between different countries and include measures as diverse as dual citizenship policies, programs to stimulate remittances, the right to vote in the home country from abroad, and the creation of government agencies to administer emigrant issues. The EMIX proposes a useful tool to condense and compare a wide spectrum of policies across countries. Its development involved the collection of official data, as well as a critical review of secondary literature and input from experts as complementary sources. Through a rigorous framework for constructing the index, we show how emigrant policies can be aggregated to measure the overall degree and volume of emigrant policies in LAC states. The results of the EMIX portray a region that has indeed made serious efforts to assist their diaspora in the states of reception and to encourage their involvement in the political, economic and social fabric in the states of origin. The results, however, also reveal great variation in the emigrant policies and the administrative setting adopted by LAC states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on diaspora engagement policies, transnational and extra-territorial citizenship has painted the increasing recognition of dual nationality and the extension of state policies to the diaspora as a signal of states leaving behind the paradigms of exclusive nationality and residence as conditions to exercise citizenship. In doing this, this literature tends to treat citizenship and nationality as synonyms. By analysing the citizenship policies of 22 Latin American and Caribbean states towards their nationals who reside abroad and/or acquire another nationality, we add key nuances to such consideration: nationality and citizenship may relate to different legal statuses – with important consequences for migrants – and there might be differences also between the citizen rights of nationals by origin and of nationals by naturalization. In particular, we show that citizenship and nationality interact in different ways when it comes to the preservation of rights for emigrants: the distinctions allow restricting the portability of citizenship rights for nationals by birth, and other groups of nationals, depending on the exclusivity, and origin, of their national belonging. These distinctions tell a potentially different story of how citizenship is conceived of by states as they approach the challenges of membership and participation posed by emigration, and paint a less rosy picture with regard to the demise of exclusive nationality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A growing literature deals with the models that states have developed to reach out to their emigrant communities. The literature covers a wide range of initiatives, most notably electoral policies. In this line of research, we present a comparative view of the citizenship policies of Latin American and Caribbean states using a data set that includes information (yearly observations from 1950 to 2015) of the external franchise policies of 22 countries. First, this paper describes the scope of inclusion of non-resident citizens in terms of electoral rights. Second, we study the evolution over time of the external franchise policies of the countries under study. Despite cultural, historical and obvious geographic commonalities across countries, the analyses reveal that the convergence trend in the external franchise policies developed by Latin American and Caribbean countries is limited to a most general level. Below that level many variations in terms of specific electoral rights, types and venues of representation of emigrants are observable. These variations range from exclusion of non-resident citizens in terms of electoral rights, to full inclusion, when emigrants have active and passive electoral rights in all the national elections held in the states of origin (presidential and/or legislative). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specialized indices of immigration, immigrant integration policies, and citizenship policies are expanding the confines of our knowledge in the field of comparative migration policies. Emigration policies, however, have garnered less attention. We address this gap in the literature, by using a new data set to create an index that measures contemporary emigration regulations of 32 polities across three regions in the world (Asia, Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean). Based on this exploratory exercise, we examine the assumptions about emigration controls and policies being a matter of the past or belonging to non‐democratic regimes. We find that emigration policies go beyond the mere regulation of the right to exit. Different components across a continuum from restriction to encouragement of emigration suggest different rationales and purposes of states, even if the hardest forms of emigration control, such as exit bans are absent in the studied sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]