Out of sight, out of mind? External voting and the political representation of Portuguese emigrants

• Autor(a) principal: Lisi, M.
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Outros Autores: Belchior, A. M., Abrantes, M., Azevedo, J.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/9485
• topic: External voting; Emigrants; Citizenship; Electoral systems; Voting rights; Portugal

Over recent decades, emigrants have gained expanded voting rights on a global scale. Despite the normative debates about this issue, there are few empirical studies on why states decide to implement external voting and how electoral systems perform. This article seeks to fill this gap by looking at the Portuguese case. Our study suggests that a combination of political and socio-economic factors explains the implementation of external voting. On the other hand, the interests of political parties and the low level of civil society engagement are key to determining the failure of electoral reforms and the attempts to overcome the shortcomings of external voting.