Building Party Support Abroad: Turkish Diaspora Organisations in Germany and the UK

Abstract

This article covers a unique form of political mobilisation within the Turkey-originated diasporic community in Europe that formed after Turkey introduced external voting in 2012. Although existing literature has paid attention to the impact of homeland political parties on external voting rights and diaspora organisations’ role in electoral campaigns, these organisations’ impact on members’ mobilisation capacities for certain homeland parties remains understudied. This article tackles this topic by first comparing Turkey-originated diaspora organisations in Germany and the UK. Secondly, it guides future empirical work on the impact of the diaspora organisations on remote partisans’ political orientation by taking the dominant emigrant profile in a residence country dimension into the study of external voting. Focusing on eligible Turkish citizens, the findings of this article are based on participant observation and 60 in-depth interviews conducted with remote voters who participated in the mobilisation of Turkey-based political parties in Germany between 2018 and 2023 and in the UK between 2021 and 2023 through diaspora organisations.