Resident and Non-Resident Finnish Citizens View External Voting Rights Differently

The FACE Project Manager Johanna Peltoniemi, together with Staffan  Himmelroos,  draw on public opinion research to gain new insights on external voting rights. They examine the desirability of external voting, an issue where political theorists have been quite divided, by asking both resident and non-resident citizens how they view external voting rights. In their article recently published in Scandinavian Political Studies, they show that resident and non-resident Finnish citizens view external voting rights differently. They suggest that voting rights have a different meaning for residents and non-residents: To the majority of the resident citizens voting rights insinuate an active relationship with the democratic society they are part of, whereas for non-residents, electoral rights in the homeland seem to be important primarily as a symbolic gesture of romanticized belonging to the country of origin. The article is available in an open access format at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9477.12211.