Authors

Discussion

After decades of forced participation, one of the major changes from communist to post-communist elections (apart from multiple candidates) was the option of abstention from voting.  Although some post-Soviet states have returned to mobilised authoritarian elections, electoral turnout levels in the democratic post-communist states generally continue to be lower than in Western Europe (Kostadinova and Power 2007; Zagorski 2022).  Studies (e.g., Hutcheson and Russo 2021, Hansen 2021; Maškarinec 2022) indicate that this pattern also exists amongst their diasporas abroad.  Where they have voting rights in other countries’ elections (e.g., at municipal or European Parliament level), or can participate in their own countries’ elections from abroad, electoral participation rates of citizens from former communist states still tend to be several percentage points lower than those of migrants from other parts of the EU and the rest of the world (Kostelka 2017).

The proposed paper takes a closer look at the reasons for this.  Examining the political participation of diasporas from post-Soviet and post-communist states, it will study the phenomenon of low electoral turnout amongst post-communist citizens both at home and abroad.  Using a combination of detailed register data and focus groups with post-communist diasporas in Sweden (where all residents can vote in local elections after a certain period of minimum residence), and studies of the infrastructure around elections more generally, it examines the central question of whether the low electoral turnout of post-communist citizens relates to aspects of the political culture, or other contingent factors.