Information on the electoral turnout of emigrants is limited and patchy, but available evidence suggests that non-resident voters’ turnout is significantly below that of native citizens. Three factors may be responsible for this – (1) lower political interest in politics once a person has left the country; (2) the mode of representation (separate or assimilated); and (3) practical the difficulties in accessing the vote such as registration hurdles and embassy voting. The proposed paper will utilise the rich data on electoral eligibility collected as part of the EU-funded FRACIT project (http://eudo-citizenship.eu/about/fracit), as well as available statistics on emigrant electoral turnout, to investigate these three phenomena in parallel and create a typology of emigrant voting patterns across the 28 EU states.
