Geographies of external voting: the Tunisian elections abroad since the 2011 Uprising

Abstract

This contribution draws on the developing literature on the participation of citizens’ abroad in elections of their country of origin. It looks at Tunisia as a case study. Although it focuses on a single case study, this paper is comparative to the extent that it puts the case of Tunisia in perspective with other cases from the literature, and that it discusses the influence of different settings on the voter turnout and the voting behaviour of the Tunisians abroad. By doing so, it shows how Tunisian specificities contribute to academic discussions on the diffusion of new citizenship norms in the age of globalization and on the extent to which migration contributes to political change in labour sending countries. The paper first explores the adoption of external voting provisions by the former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali as soon as 1988, and the extension of external voting rights after the 2011 Uprising. The paper further adopts a geographic, diachronic, and multi-level approach to analyse the voter turnout and the voting behaviour among the Tunisians abroad since 2011. Results first show that the adoption and implementation of external voting in Tunisia is closely articulated to domestic processes of political change, regardless of the type of regime (authoritarian or democratic). Furthermore, results show that the voting behaviour of the Tunisians abroad follows the same trends than their Tunisian counterparts, but that it varies significantly depending on their place of residence (country, city, and neighbourhood). Such observation challenges the idea according to which migrants socialised with liberal values in Western societies tend to promote such values in their homeland. In contrast, this paper argues that the voter turnout and the voting behaviour in external elections depend on pre-migration variables and on the local context in which migrants are embedded.