The Party Abroad: A New Modus Operandi for Political Parties

Abstract

In an era where millions of people live elsewhere than their country of birth and many hold multiple nationalities, the questions of who and how represents these people becomes imperative. The traditional manner of representation is through political parties, yet the form in which parties have historically existed is within state bounds. Throughout time, we have witnessed the transition from cadre to cartel parties and through them the changing role of the political party. This article argues that with the vast expansion of the movement of people around the world, which has been influenced by the enlargement of the European Union, by globalisation, migration and most recently by the refugee crisis, political parties are reshaping their structures both domestically and internationally, and we are witnessing the development of a ‘new modus operandi’ of political parties—the party abroad. The party abroad is viewed as a natural evolvement of the functions of domestic political parties in their response to a changing civil society and changing competitive space. The article provides a theory of the party abroad, it discusses how it relates to previous models of political parties and offers a framework based on which we can study it.

A number of developments this century have put significant pressure on representative democracy, and as such on political parties. One such development is the heightened level of movement of people across the globe—be it a result of globalisation, migration, immigration, the refugee crisis, or war. According to the United Nations, in 2019, there were 272 million migrants across the globe. This number represents 3.5 per cent of the world population and reflects a continuous growth, which outpaces the world’s population growth (UN, 2019). Migrants are people who reside outside their country of origin and move due to work, due to education or to find better living conditions (related to various aspects ranging from better pay, political security and retirement). A large number of these people are within voting age. Given that we live in an era of representative democracy, where it is the people who choose the direction of a country’s political and economic development by participating in the electoral process, this poses a problem: who represents all these individuals and how and to what extent are they still part of the democratic process?

Questions like these are very timely when we consider what is currently happening in Europe and the world. A short look around Europe gives a number of examples where either there is a sizeable diaspora of a given nation living in one or more countries different than their own, or that politicians—incumbent or opposition—seek the support of such diaspora groups in order to achieve something domestically. Consider Podemos, for example. The party formed in 2014 and with a strong anti-establishment campaign targeting specific constituencies—the young voter and the voter from abroad—emerged as the second-largest political party in Spain in terms of membership numbers. Today, Podemos has more than half a million members, residing in Spain and abroad, and it aims to specifically increase its support from abroad, where it sees a large electoral potential in the 2.5 million Spaniards living abroad, of whom, they estimate, only around 5 per cent are electorally active (Rashkova and Van der Staak, 2019). Looking a bit further East, another example is the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF). Founded in 1990, the MRF is one of Bulgaria’s established political parties. It has centre, centre-left ideology and largely supports the interests of the Turkish minority in the country. Despite its relatively small size, it has participated in almost every Bulgarian government up to 2009 and until 2014 it has been the party claiming nearly half of the national vote from abroad.¹ With an estimated 2–3 million population living abroad, of which only 108,000 have cast a vote in the 2017 parliamentary elections (less than 5 per cent), Bulgarian political parties beyond the MRF see the potential in the Bulgarian electorate abroad and have taken initial steps into mobilising its support (Bosev and Manolova, 2017).

Further, Erdogan, the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, won a decisive and controversial presidential re-election vote in 2018, with large support from Turkish voters abroad (Hill, 2018). According to Hill, Turkey has around 3 million people with voting rights living abroad, of whom 48.8 per cent turned out to vote. While allowed to campaign in Germany—where nearly half of the potential Turkish voters from abroad reside—Erdogan’s ambition to rally for his party almost stirred an international crisis, when the Netherlands and Austria did not allow campaigning to take place on their soil. In a similar trend of consecutive electoral success, the leader of Hungary’s largest party, Fidesz, Victor Orban, has also relied on support from its diaspora in neighbouring Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine for his re-election in 2014 and 2018. According to various sources, Orban enjoys the support of a large majority of the vote from abroad, especially after introducing a law in 2010, which allows the nearly 2 million ethnic Hungarians living abroad to claim citizenship (Byrne, 2016; AFP, 2018).

One cannot argue, however, that a decisive vote from abroad is a Southern or an Eastern political phenomenon. Recently, France’s new president, Emanuel Macron, won a head-to-head electoral battle with Marine Le Pen for France’s first post. Reports claim that En Marche! (LRM), Macron’s newly founded political party, won 10 of the 11 constituencies abroad (Economist, 2017). The American population living abroad is eight times more sizeable than that of France—estimated to around 8 million people—yet, it had not managed to produce a victory for its favourite 2016 presidential election candidate—Hillary Clinton—despite centralised efforts to ‘unite against Trump’ (Chase, 2016). Notwithstanding this result, however, the two main American political parties are some of the oldest political parties active abroad, and the Democrats Abroad—the US Democratic Party organisation abroad—claim to have influenced a significant US senate’s elections victory in the past (Rashkova and Van der Staak, 2019).

The actions of the political leaders described above share one feature in common—they all address their citizens living abroad on ethnic, national and cultural grounds. Political connection to people’s motherland gives not only the sense of duty (especially for those members of the diaspora who do not agree with the current government of their home country), but also feeds into the sense of belonging or loyalty (Laguerre, 2006), which can resonate with migrants’ mentality. It can be argued, that the effect of mobilisation on the connection to the country of origin is strengthened due to the fact that most people residing abroad who do not have citizenship in their new land are not allowed to participate in the national elections. At most, some countries allow permanent residents to vote in local and European-level elections. Fulfilling the desire for belonging can be said to be the driving force behind many existing attempts of politicians to mobilise their voters abroad as the empirical examples mentioned earlier in the article, suggest. On the flip side, in addition to seeing links with their fellow citizens abroad, diaspora members are often motivated to act in political unison to achieve a set of administrative rules, which benefit them all as a group distinct from local voters (see Rashkova and Van der Staak, 2019). The large number of (im)migrants that exists globally pressures the existing representative democracy model.² Given the changing social and political environment and the ensuant changing opportunity structures that political parties face, it can be argued that they have to address this changing environment, and in doing so, many can be expected to connect with their citizens abroad or their newly acquired residents at home. And while for Schattschneider (1942), the then-modern democracy was ‘unthinkable save in terms of parties’, we can safely say that in the current period, parties, who have been the channels for representative democracy are unthinkable save in terms of the people. This article focuses on this transformation of the roles and functions of the modern political party and especially on its newly assumed role as the party abroad.

The article proceeds as follows. The next section reviews the literature on the evolution of political parties and distils important junctures in their trajectory and transformation. Building on this vast literature,‘The party abroad—the birth of a new modus operandi for political parties’ section discusses the birth of a new operational transformation of part—the party abroad—and speaks about the considerations modern politicians have to make in their quest to retain the role as channels of representation in times when membership and face-to-face connections are becoming more and more obsolete. The final section provides a discussion on the theoretical proposals also in connection to some recent studies of the effect of diaspora voting on national political outcomes.

1. The evolution of political parties

The origin of political parties’ dates back centuries in history. Sartori claims that Edmund Burke’s work on political discontents of the 18th century is the first intellectual breakthrough, which makes distinction between a ‘faction’, which was perceived as bad, as a divisor and a ‘party’, seen as a larger group, which is good and united (2005, p. 8). Discussing the transformation of the term ‘party’ from ‘part’, Sartori (2005, p. 22) gives three premises—parties are not factions (the former are necessary, the latter are not); a party is part of a whole (where the whole the pluralistic whole, the party system); parties are channels of expression (they are there to represent and express the wants of the people to those who govern).

When political parties originated, especially in the sense as we refer to them today, is largely debated and varies among states and in the accounts of different political theorists. LaPalombara and Weiner (1966) review institutional, historical and developmental theories and emphasise the extension of the suffrage as a strong impetus for the creation of some form of party organisation in the West. Further, they mention the importance of crises in political systems, and in particular, the need for legitimacy. Finally, they discuss the role of modernisation of society and within it the role of changing levels of communication, education and the homogenising effect of urbanisation. While not exhaustive, LaPalombara and Weiner’s conditions for the origins of political parties are well-encompassing of the changing political environment, which simultaneously necessitated and availed the development of political parties.

The emergence of the modern political party is largely associated with the development of the mass party. Both Weber (1946) and Duverger (1954) see the emergence of the mass party as a sharp contrast to previous associations of ‘circles of notables’ or ‘cadre parties’ in that these new parties are born out of the mass franchise and the necessity to organise the masses and seek a sense of direction. Duverger argues that the main distinction between cadre parties and mass parties is one of structure—while the conception of cadre parties is to win elections based on selection (of particular individuals who provide expertise, influence and finances), the idea of the mass party is inclusion of all (it achieves that through the establishment of a system of branches, which educate and recruit the masses, and rely on their broad membership for financial support). The mass party appeals to the public and ‘it was the popular base of parties which was to ensure their legitimacy’; it ‘reflected the public will and provided the crucial linkage between the citizenry and the state’ (Mair, 1990, p. 2).

Mair argues that in addition to its spread throughout society, the emergence of the mass party and through it, the development of political identity, had a stabilising and consolidating effect for the party systems, where organisation and the ability to draw votes were crucial. It can be argued that precisely this need of connection to one’s constituencies has facilitated the transformation of mass parties to what Kirchheimer (1966) termed catch-all parties. The catch-all party abandons the desire of education and encadrement of the voter and turns its focus to the electoral scene (Kirchheimer, 1966, p. 184). It becomes responsive to the electoral market and rather than relying on a broad spreading, it relies on specialisation and the gathering of all potential electoral support under its concrete theme. Kirchheimer lists three crucial functions of the party—integrating individuals and groups into the existing political order, determine political-action preferences and influence others into accepting them, and nominating public office holders. In this sense, as Mair (1990) argues, the political party shifts from the bottom-up structure of the mass party to a top-down approach of the catch-all party, whereas the latter is an ‘organizational phenomenon’ (1990, p. 6). The very competition among parties and the reported (Lipset and Rokkan, 1968) freezing of the party system, partly a result of the fact that ‘many of the great issues which once sustained traditional loyalties have. more or less been resolved’ (Mair, 1990, p. 8), puts the whole question of the transformation to this new style of organised party to the forefront. Mair argues that three factors explain the move to the catch-all party despite the vulnerabilities of support, which it brings. These include organisational and institutional developments as, for example, changes in the financing of political parties, facing a more knowledgeable electorate, and the potential of being part of government.

Krouwel’s (2003) extensive review of Kirchheimer’s (1966) work details the development and subsequent revision of the term catch-all party, emphasising the fact that Kirchheimer’s entire theory of the party was based on his observations of the diminishing existence of opposition both in parliament and in society and the increasing concentration of politics as the management of the state. According to Krouwel, it was Kirchheimer who first warned of the potential fusion between the parties and the state, a phenomenon, which later became known as the cartel party (Katz and Mair, 1995). Katz and Mair analyse the development of the political party vis-à-vis its relationship not only with civil society, but also with the state, and argue that as political parties have moved closer to the state than they are to the people, we observe a phenomenon similar to that of cartelisation. The claim is that opposing parties in power collide with each other in rule making and distributive regulations, mainly of state subventions and other spoils, in order to secure their collective survival. While not without critique (Koole, 1996), the notion of the cartel party has turned into a powerful concept in theoretical and empirical work on parties (Katz and Mair, 1996, 2009; Hopkin, 2004; Scarrow, 2006) and party systems (Booth and Robbins, 2010; Potter and Tavits, 2015; Casal Bértoa et al., 2014; van Biezen and Rashkova, 2014). Importantly, Katz and Mair note that while in the era of the cartel party, parties have become semi-state agencies, ‘parties are not necessarily wholly cartel parties’, as they were never wholly elite parties, mass parties of catch-all parties; ‘rather, all of these models represent types to which individual parties may approximate more or less closely at any given time’ (1995, p. 19). This statement emphasises the fluidity, flexibility and adaptiveness of political parties, as they seem able to respond well to changes in the environment within which they act.

Even though political parties of the various types have diverged in the manner in which they approach elections, the electorate and each other, as they have differed in their principal goals or position between civil society and the state, all four party models share one unchanged feature in common—the realm of their playing field. Each one of the described party types, which has developed through the 20th century, shares the characteristic that it operates within national boundaries. However, with the changes in the structure of the society that we currently live in, and especially with the growing dissolution, actual or through the mechanisms of modern globalisation, of state borders, political parties have yet again to adapt. They need to adapt not only to the changing domestic competitive environment, which now includes parties that rely largely on a new set of voters—those residing abroad—but also to the changing modes of financing and reaching out to an ever larger, and mobile, constituency. It is these conditions that give the rise of a new operational transformation, a new role of parties, namely, the party abroad.

2. The party abroad—the birth of a new modus operandi for political parties

The 21st century is one marked with legitimacy crises, declining party membership, lower voter turnout, and increasing struggle of political parties to find and retain stable electoral support. The latter is a function as much as of internal—domestic—challenges, such as corruption scandals and the rise of anti-establishment political support, as of external—transcending the domestic border—developments, such as the large movement of people, and thus potential electorate across the world or the changing politico-economic position of individual states vis-à-vis the changing politico-economic European and global order. These changes inevitably affect the two key stakeholders considered in prior models of party organisation within states—the civil society and the state. Today, what Katz and Mair (1995) term the civil society—the people who can potentially become political supporters and those whose interests’ parties aspire to represent—sprawl far beyond the state. At the same time, however, in many cases, people residing beyond their state of origin retain citizenship, thus also citizenship rights—from the right of representation to the simple right of specific bureaucratic services—to which the state, and hence the parties operating the state, ought to respond to.

These developments in modern society pose three major challenges to acting or establishing political parties—the challenge of the changing social structures (with change in ‘location’ through the vast current movement of people and the change in ‘loyalty’ observed in declining party membership and movement away from political parties), the challenge of changing competition (new political parties forming from within and outside already governing structures, resulting in frequently altering competition to which established parties need to respond if they want to stay afloat) and the challenge of a changing competitive environment (reflected in a changing mode and level of communication, education and organisation of any existing group, which directly pressures parties to update their manner and efficiency of linkage with those who they want to reach, recruit and retain). Given that political parties originated in the people, consider the days of the cadre and the mass parties for instance, and then transformed as a result of the forming competition among them, parties, like firms on the market, are called to adapt to the changing demands of society and the changing rivals and competitive space in which they function.

This article argues that to a large part the response of (national) political parties to the challenges that change in social structures, competition and competitive environment pose, is reflected in the emergence of a new modus operandi for parties, which we term—the party abroad. In order to understand the emergence of this new role of parties (building on their primary function as organisers of citizens’ demands), and to be able to claim that a given party adopts the party abroad modus operandi to a certain extend at any given time, we need to look at its defining characteristics (for an overview, see Table 1). To do that, it is useful to reiterate Katz and Mair’s (1995, p. 17) assertion that the distinction between the different models of parties, and thus the manner in which parties operate, lies in the different social and political context within which each type of party emerged and flourished and a party is never fully one type or another, rather, we can classify parties in their manners of operation on a continuum. It is important to note that the party abroad as a new arena in which parties operate (Kernalegenn and Van Haute, 2020) is neither fully a new party type, as most parties that operate abroad do so in order to participate on the national political arena and as an extension of their national operations, nor it is simply a party branch, as it engages more than one single diaspora constituency. The party abroad is somewhere in between—analytically, it is smaller than a distinct party type, yet larger than a local party branch.³ In terms of our interest of political parties’ engagement abroad, the framework of analysis consists of two parts, on the one hand, a framework vis-à-vis national models of party operation, and on the other hand, vis-à-vis other parties who have adopted this new modus operandi and to some extent operate abroad.

Table 1

Different of parties’ models of operation and their characteristics

Characteristics	Elite party	Mass party	Catch-all party	Cartel party	Party abroad
Time period	19th century	1880–1960	1945–	1970–	21st centurya
Social–political inclusion	Restricted suffrage	Enfranchisement and mass suffrage	Mass suffrage	Mass suffrage	Restricted suffrage
Distribution of political resources	Highly restricted	Relatively concentrated	Less concentrated	Relatively diffused	Very diffused
Principle goals of politics	Distribution of privileges	Social reformation	Social amelioration	Politics as profession	Preservation of profession
Basis of party competition	Ascribed status	Representative capacity	Policy effectiveness	Managerial skills, efficiency	Mobilisation skills
Pattern of electoral competition	Managed	Mobilisation	Competitive	Contained	Dependent
Party work and party campaigning	Irrelevant	Labour intensive	Labour and capital intensive	Capital intensive	Labour and capital intensive
Principal source of party’s resources	Personal contacts	Members’ fees and contributions	Contribution from many sources	State subventions	Donations, members’ fees, subventions
Relations between members and elite	Elites are members	Bottom up (accountable elite)	Top down	Mutual autonomy	Mutual autonomy
Character of membership	Small and elitist	Large, homogeneous, rights and obligations	Open to all (heterogeneous), rights but no obligations	Neither rights nor obligations important; individual members	Limited or non-existent
Channels of communication	Networks	Party’s own channels	Party competes for access to non-party channels	Party has privileged access to state channels	Assimilates channels of diaspora
Position between civil society and state	Unclear boundary	Party belongs to civil society	Parties as competing brokers b/n civil society and state	Party becomes part of state	Party reaches beyond state
Representative style	Trustee	Delegate	National entrepreneur	Agent of the state	Entrepreneur beyond borders

a

The first party abroad (Democrats Abroad) was associated much earlier, in the 1960s, but for the larger emergence of this type of party we take the turn of the century.

Note: Note that the presented models of party evolution and development are based on Katz and Mair’s (1995) original article and their subsequent work and do not include all alternative models found in the party politics literature (e.g. the more recent phenomenon of business-firm parties as depicted by Krouwel, 2006).

Source: Adapted from Katz and Mair (1995); further developed by author.

2.1 The party abroad vis-à-vis national models for party operation

The first characteristic of the traditional party models is the time period within which they have originated. For the initial four types of parties, this distinction overlaps well with concrete historic time periods; for the party abroad, the latter is rather blurred. We can take as a starting point the earliest known example of an association of a national party abroad, that of the US Democratic Party—the Democrats Abroad—which began its activity abroad in the 1960s.⁴ Given its singular character, a more reliable initial period for the broader origination of the party abroad as modus operandi would be the beginning of the 21st century. Evidence shows that currently there are a number of national parties around the world who rally and operate at some level abroad (see introduction and other papers in symposium for examples). Parties can also be diversified based on their social–political inclusion and by their membership. While the mass, catch-all and cartel parties are recognised by mass suffrage, the party abroad is more similar to the elite or cadre parties which are associated with limited suffrage. The limitation, however, is of different kind. While in the era of the cadre parties, the limitation came from the inclusion of a small group of rich, male, elite, that wanted to pursue group interests, and this type of a party structure was similar in different countries, the limited suffrage in the era of the party abroad is a result of varying domestic legislation on the subject of the level of inclusion of non-resident citizens in the electoral process. As can be seen in each of the other contributions in the symposium, national legislation varies based on the type of elections in which citizens living abroad can vote for, as well as the period of time that they are still eligible to vote while living abroad. The question of membership is similarly varying, although here, we may have a combination of national legislation that allows or disallows membership from abroad, and in addition, political parties may have varying strategies depending on their size, goal or organisation (see Rashkova and Van der Staak, 2019 for details).

Katz and Mair (1995) rightfully point out that while the different types of parties emerged as a result of the changing social and political context around them, the principle goal of politics and the basis of party competition were paramount in the shaping of each individual type. Through the various stages of party development, we see a shift in the goal of the party from one centred on the people, to one centred on the organisation. The goal of the cartel party, for example, has been to practice politics as a profession, where we can understand the latter as something non-transient, but stable, something which has persistency and values experience. It can be argued, that the goal of the party abroad builds directly, but further, onto the cartel party’s goal, in that, the main goal of the party now becomes the preservation of the profession. This preservation is necessary as parties become aware that political success and political survival are not solely dependent on their interaction with the other political elite, but is also highly dependent on voters and voter support, which as a result of a number of factors has been in decline in recent years (Van Biezen et al., 2012). Consequently, considering the large number of people who reside outside their country of origin, coupled with a pattern of dissolution of political participation of society at large, this pool of potential voters becomes important and even crucial for preservation of the profession of the political parties.

The goal of politics inevitably affects the pattern of electoral competition, the party campaigning, sources of financing, as well as its character of membership and channels of communication. While the pattern of competition evolved from managed under the elite parties, to highly competitive with the catch-all party, and then contained by the cartel parties, in the era of the party abroad we can say that electoral competition is dependent on votes and thus can be termed ‘targeted’. This movement to a more active pursuit of votes comes together with the fact that in addition to state subventions, parties rely heavily on donations and somewhat less heavily on members’ fees, given that membership for the party abroad is to a large extent limited and, often, non-existent. The position between civil society and the state of the party abroad is distinct from the other models of party in that the party abroad reaches beyond the state and its representative style is one of an entrepreneur beyond state borders. The strive for reaching voters across state borders also necessitates a revised communication strategy and while for the catch-all and the cartel party a significant role is played by access to non-party state channels, for the party abroad a main source of communication are the communication channels of the diaspora. In that sense, the competition among parties is not for the different channels of communication, but rather for different pockets of diaspora, whose channels of communication then parties assimilate.

2.2 The party abroad vis-à-vis other parties that operate abroad

The previous section and analytical characteristics help us distinguish among the functions of national parties. Once we have evaluated the extent to which parties can be classified as having adopted this new modus operandi of the party abroad, we can proceed a step further into classifying the variation among the type of party abroad operations that parties are involved in. Building on the typology developed by Rashkova and van der Staak (2020) and the multidimensionality of parties abroad discussed in Kernalegenn and Van Haute’s (2020) volume, this article diversifies organisational varieties of the party abroad based on three factors: (1) level of organisation, (2) link to and influence to a national political party and (3) the national regulatory framework conditioning the extent of operation beyond national borders.⁵Table 2 contains a summary of the general classification.

Table 2

Organisational varieties of the party abroad

	Low	Medium	High
Level of organisation	Informal	Small formal structures	Formal structures
Link to a national party	Limited or non-existent	No rights and obligations	Rights and obligations
Legislative framework	Non-existent	Rules of establishment and operation	Reserved seats/ban of overseas operations

Source: Created by author.

We see that each organisational component of the party abroad can be classified at low, medium and high levels. Most broadly, for the level of organisation, this reflects whether the party that operates abroad does so under informal and unstructured manner (low) or whether it has formally established structures, which organise events with potential constituents on a regular, rather than simply ad hoc, basis. The second component for analysis—link to and influence to a national party—probably contains the largest number of sub-categories that we can consider. Broadly, they can be summarised as limited or non-existent to formal rights and obligations and can range from issues like membership and dues to origin of initial establishment and ability to influence interparty politics at the national level. Last, but not least, is the third component, the legal framework, within which (national) parties can operate abroad. This can broadly vary from no or negligent record of noting such activity in the public law, to having very distinct and strict rules on what is and is not allowed. The most legal involvement can be reserving parliamentary seats for the representation of the diaspora, or it may be that the law explicitly bans political operation abroad. While simple, this initial framework provides ground for analysing different models of the party abroad and allows for further comparison of empirical cases, which can further deepen our knowledge of parties and party structures.

3. Discussion and conclusion

The characteristics of the emergence of the party abroad as a new party modus operandi are useful for the examination of this growing phenomenon, which has thus far been largely unaddressed by the party politics literature (Kernalegenn and Van Haute, 2020; Rashkova and van der Staak, 2020 are exceptions). The presence of changing political dynamics and with them the emergence of a new party role is evident, not only in the examples where key contemporary politicians have turned to mobilisation of their diaspora abroad, but also in the rather large literature on voting rights and emigrant political engagement (Blais et al., 2001; Bauböck, 2005; Waterbury, 2018; Østergaard-Nielsen and Ciornei, 2019). While extremely informative, this scholarship is primarily on the normative treatment of voting of non-resident citizens and non-citizen residents and states reactions to it. It says little about the effect the mass movement of people has on the character and changing activity of the political parties. Østergaard-Nielsen and Ciornei (2019) are an exception in that they look at ways to measure, evaluate and compare transnational campaigns of political parties in four states. However, we miss a systematic examination of national political parties’ activities abroad across various country cases, which can inform about the trajectory (or the lack thereof) of party development in its relation and ambition to connect to national diaspora abroad. Furthermore, we have almost no knowledge about the state of regulation of political parties operations abroad and how this varies across states and across contexts. Once we have a better view of the spread of the party abroad phenomenon, we need to ask what explains various levels of engagement and how do these affect the national political competition. Only then, can the literatures from migration studies and party politics be put side by side and engage in a meaningful intellectual conversation about the new structure of the party system and countries’ renewed electoral support map. And while for Sartori (1968) a structured party system was defined as one in which the major parties become more ‘solid’ and more ‘real’ than the personalities of their leaders, recent evidence shows that in today’s political world it is again the personalities leading the parties and it is the new and ambitious contestants that often determine the structure of the party system. In Sartori’s terms, today’s political reality would be approximated to an unstructured party system since it is the change and the ephemeral factors that bring about current structure, rather than the long-established political parties that consistently feed a certain political equilibrium.

Footnotes

1

The aftermath of who wins the vote from abroad has changed significantly in Bulgaria since 2014 when there has been an observed attempt to equalize the abroad vote playing field by limiting the number of voting section in neighboring Turkey, which in the years prior have been disproportionately higher than in any other foreign state (Bosev and Manolova, 2017).

2

Jeremy Corbyn’s recent promise, to allow migrants in the UK to participate in the electoral process on equal terms as nationals, touches people on a similar note—that of belonging and that of a voice.

3

Emigrant-driven parties, which have been fully established abroad and operate abroad without any connection to national political parties, constitute an exception. For them, the party abroad is not a new role of a pre-existing party, but is a main role to a new party. While not undermining the importance of parties, which have originated abroad, the focus here is mainly on the party abroad as an extension of roles and functions to nationally existing parties.

4

Some political activity abroad has taken place already in the 19th century (see Kernalegenn and van Haute, 2020), however, these are historical examples of revolutionary or anti-colonialist enclaves, rather than operations of fully fledged and operational political parties, as nationally competing parties that we consider here.

5

While the organizational varieties in Table 2 have been developed primarily with national parties' operations abroad in mind, emigrant-driven parties can also be placed within the typology. They would vary on the ‘level of organization’ and ‘regulatory framework’, but not in terms of their link to a national political party (which would be null).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the participants of the Party Abroad workshop held at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Amsterdam in December 2019, the journal editors and the external reviewer, for their useful comments and remarks. All mistakes remain my own. The author would like to thank International IDEA for financial support for organising the workshop on the Party Abroad in Amsterdam, December, 2019, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) for hosting it.