Who should vote? Attitudes towards expatriate political participation in the Nigerian Diaspora


Thomas Soehl, McGill University

Migration is a profoundly political act and in turn has political consequence: the decision to leave is in many ways a vote of no confidence in the home state. As observed by Santamaria Gomez– one of the deepest sentiments of Mexican migrants to the US, one of the quintessential labor migrations, is that “with a ‘good government’ they would not have had to leave their country” (Santamaria Gomez 1994:165). At the same time emigration profoundly re-shapes political relationships. As immigrants they are outsiders in the polities of their host societies (at least initially) but as emigrants they retain political membership in their home state – notably citizenship. But should they retain all the rights and privileges that come with citizenship? A key question is emigrant’s right to political participation in the country of origin – the right to vote and the right to run for political office. While a significant amount of research has examined the normative implications, and the factors that contribute to the rapid spread of expatriate voting rights, a lot less is known about the opinions of emigrants who gain the right to participate and those who did not migrate but have to share the franchise with emigrants. The key data source for our project is a unique survey that combined a sample of Nigerians in Nigeria (N~1500) with a samples of Nigerian emigrants in 10 countries around the world (~400 in each country, total N~3500). We used targeted social media advertising to recruit respondents to take a 15 minutes survey that featured questions on migration biography and political attitudes in addition to basic socio-demographics. We assess the quality of the data in a separate paper which we also submit for presentation to PAA.  The key dependent variable is respondent’s attitude towards expatriate political participation. We ask respondents whether or not Nigerians who are living abroad should be able to a) vote in federal elections, b) vote in local elections and c) run for elected office. Our key independent variables are respondent’s evaluation of the quality of democracy in Nigeria and their assessment of free speech. We control for political interest and a set of socio-economic and demographic variables. PRELIMINARY FINDINGS: Attitudes towards expatriate political participation: After matching emigrants to those at home on observable background characteristics we find that NIGERIANS AT HOME ARE MORE LIKELY TO SUPPORT EXPATRIATE POLITICAL PARTICIPATION THAN NIGERIAN EMIGRANTS. This gap is mainly driven by differing views on running for office. Those abroad are ten percentage points less likely than those at home to think they should be able to run for office. In other words, Nigerians at home want their compatriots overseas to be allowed the right to run for office more than their compatriots overseas want this right. Correlates of attitudes towards expatriate political participation: Our preliminary analysis focusses on the correlation between evaluation of democracy and free speech and support for our measures of expatriate political participation. Here we observe distinct patterns for Nigerian emigrants and our sample of Nigerians in Nigeria. Among expatriates those more satisfied with democracy are actually less supportive of their own right to vote. In contrast satisfaction with democracy does not seem to matter for assessment of expatriate voting rights for Nigerians in Nigeria. In contrast among those abroad we see that is satisfaction with the state of free speech that is associated with less support for expatriate political participation. Or looking at it the other way – those who feel limited in their ability to freely speak their mind are more supportive of expatriate political rights – possibly in the hope that the members of the diaspora that do not have to fear repercussions from the state can speak on behalf of those who do have to fear consequences for their speech.

Non-presenting author: Aaron Erlich, McGill University

This paper will be presented at the following session: