Diasporas’ Affinity for Ecological Groups

“Go means Green: Diasporas’ Affinity for Ecological Groups,” a study co-authored by Anca Turcu, Ph.D., and R. Urbatsch, Ph.D., of Iowa State University, was published by Global Environmental Politics (a MIT Press Journal) in January 2020.

Recent expansions of diaspora rights have given overseas residents increasing political voice. This study shows this is particularly significant for environmental politics, because expatriates’ distinctive values, typically more cosmopolitan and multicultural than domestic voters’, are likely to align with green organizations’. Large-N analyses of an original, cross-national data set of election returns show that, as hypothesized, political parties classified in standard databases as belonging to the ecological family receive larger shares of the emigrant vote than of the domestic vote. These results persist when controlling for other factors that may win diaspora votes, such as incumbency or inclusion in a government that extended suffrage overseas. https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/glep_a_00538