Migrant populations and external voting: the politics of suffrage expansion in Central America

Recent decades have seen an enormous expansion in the number of countries allowing their nonresident citizens to vote from abroad, and an emerging literature has sought to identify the factors that lead countries to adopt such external voting policies. This article contributes to this literature by examining the heretofore neglected cases of El Salvador and Guatemala, both of which have large expatriate populations and yet were slow to adopt external voting. I show that the eventual adoption of external voting in these cases was influenced by persistent emigrant lobbying for enfranchisement, the diffusion of an international norm of external voting, and partisan calculations. I also find that two factors largely overlooked in previous research – resource constraints and crowded electoral reform agendas – help account for long delays in policy change. Differences in the reform process across the two countries reflect the varying impact of norm diffusion across countries and differences in the countries’ political party systems.