Diaspora voting: A new item on the ‘menu of manipulation’?

Since 1990, over 100 countries have extended voting rights to citizens abroad, enfranchising roughly 200 million voters around the world. Yet little scholarship addresses the relationship between external voting and electoral manipulation. Drawing on the path-breaking ‘Menu of Manipulation’ (2002), we systematically explore how voting abroad can strategically violate democratic norms, highlighting tactics deployed by governments around the world to subvert elections through the manipulation of external voting. Our analysis generates several implications regarding relationships between diaspora voting, electoral integrity, regime type, and the role of host states. We provide testable hypotheses, preliminary analyses, and pathways for future empirical research.