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Despite proliferating research on party politics and notable media engagement with the issues of migration and refugee flows, we know little about the existence and operation of ‘the party abroad’. The latest UN migration report states that more than 270 million people reside outside their country of origin. osce recognizes the need for representation of varied political views as one means to maintain democratic stability within states. This study unravels the notion of the ‘party abroad’, develops a theoretical legal framework within which it can exist, and empirically exams parties that operate abroad. The case studies show the potential for political engagement with the diaspora, that such operations are not systematically regulated at the moment, and that parties operating abroad have different financing models. These findings, coupled with increasing migration, call for more future work on the party abroad, both by academics and by professionals.

This article presents developments around the party abroad phenomenon within the world of international democracy assistance. It provides an overview of where ‘the party abroad’ sits as a topic within the broader field of democracy assistance, and how democracy assistance providers have addressed it in the past. It argues that even though the party abroad has grown among political parties themselves, it has thus far received scant attention from democracy assistance providers. However, there are reasons to believe that the party abroad will continue to grow among political parties and that assistance providers will also include a stronger focus on the party abroad in their work in years to come.

Living in a globalised world, with its inherent easier movement of people between nations, imposes new challenges for representative democracy and for party politics specifically. Political parties have traditionally operated at a domestic level, yet, with the large number of people moving around the globe, this is now changing. This special section, deriving from a workshop on the topic, is one of the first attempts to systematically address this issue. It offers a theoretical framework and five empirical studies on the party abroad. The collection provides evidence of varied levels of existence of the party abroad in different contexts. It illustrates that the party abroad as a new modus operandi for parties that exist in all corners of the world; yet, it is most distinctly developed where the electoral stimuli and the type and size of the diaspora group give strategic incentive to political parties to do so.

In various countries, the electoral behaviour of citizens who live outside their nation of origin—the diaspora—has played a key role in the success of political parties in their home countries. The research presented in this Discussion Paper looks at the idea of the party abroad and aims to explain how and to what extent national political parties engage with citizens who live outside their country. It considers the legal treatment of how political parties can operate beyond national borders and it presents various models that can be used by parties wishing to engage with their citizens abroad.