Extending Citizenship to Emigrants: Democratic Contestation and a New Global Norm

We argue that the growing literature on emigrant policies should be linked to more general theoretical discussions of the expansion of formal citizenship. State responses to emigrants’ claims for membership and voting rights resemble patterns of citizenship extension to other previously excluded groups, such as those without property, racial minorities, and women, insofar as emigrant citizenship has developed as a consequence of competitive regimes and international norms. We assess the ‘global-norm hypothesis’ (the idea that increasing emigrant inclusion has resulted from the emergence of a new international normative standard) and the ‘contestation hypothesis’ (the argument that higher levels of regime competition make states more likely to extend citizenship to emigrants). The latter has two associated expectations: the ‘window-of-opportunity sub-hypothesis’, which holds that regime transitions provide an especially propitious context for implementing emigrant citizenship, and the ‘democratic-endurance sub-hypothesis’, which posits that competitive regimes are likely to extend emigrant citizenship in a gradual process over time. We use a combination of statistical analysis and case studies of Armenia, Mexico, Spain, and the USA to evaluate these causal hypotheses as well as some plausible alternatives found in the literature on expatriate policies.