Incentives to cultivate a diaspora vote and rhetorical involvement in foreign elections: Lessons from Colombian politicians’ involvement in the 2020 US presidential election

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhat explains politicians’ involvement in foreign elections? Understanding this behavior is important not only because it has received little scholarly attention but also because it could undermine public faith in electoral integrity in target countries. In this study, I consider an electorally based explanation, which suggests that politicians’ electoral incentives to appeal to expatriate voters in a foreign country can explain their rhetorical involvement in that country’s elections. I test this argument in the context of the 2020 US presidential election, where more than 50 Colombian MPs extensively promoted or attacked Joe Biden and Donald Trump on social media. My analysis indicates that whether Colombian MPs competed for Colombian Americans’ votes and their popularity in the US are the systematic correlates of how much they got involved in the 2020 US election. The findings highlight how diaspora enfranchisement is important to understand elite online communication that cuts across national borders.KEYWORDS: Colombiaconstituency communicationdiasporaelectoral interventionsocial media AcknowledgmentsI would like to thank Brian Crisp, Christopher Lucas, Theodore Masthay, Jacob Montgomery, Guillermo Rosas, Margit Tavits, Yi-Ting Wang, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 2023 Southern Political Science Association Annual Meeting.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Supplementary materialSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2023.2278541Notes1. Put differently, they may become skeptical about the extent to which election outcomes reflect the will of the people. Media reporting of an intervention event is often sufficient to trigger this negative effect of eroding voter confidence (Dawood, Citation2021).2. According to Hutcheson and Arrighi (Citation2015), four different diaspora electoral systems are used around the world. First is reserved seats, which allow expatriates to elect their own representatives. The other three types of diaspora electoral systems do not create a special constituency for overseas voters but provide different mechanisms to aggregate diaspora votes either (i) in districts where expatriates have biographical ties; (ii) in a single preexisting district within the state (usually the capital city); or (iii) as a part of a national voting total. Colombia uses reserved seats for the lower house and (iii) for the upper house.3. However, in Appendix B, I extend the analysis to Colombian MPs’ involvement in elections in Spain and Venezuela and show that diaspora electoral incentives are useful predictors in these elections as well.4. According to Burgess and Tyburski (Citation2020), overseas voters’ turnout varies across countries, from below 1% point in countries like Mexico to more than 40% points in Italy.5. This allows them to avoid unnecessary conflicts with competitors (Crisp & Desposato, Citation2004).6. Østergaard-Nielsen and Camatarri (Citation2022) also show that Italian MPs elected via diaspora reserved seats tend to hold different views about their representative roles, perceiving themselves more as trustees than delegates.7. This makes Colombian Americans the third largest voting bloc for the US elections in Florida, second only to Cubans and Puerto Ricans. During the 2020 US presidential election, both Biden and Trump camps ran extensive campaigns targeting Colombian Americans (Salazar, Citation2020; Sesin, Citation2020a).8. See Appendix C.9. See https://www.camara.gov.co/ (House of Representatives); https://www.senado.gov.co/ (Senate); and https://congresovisible.uniandes.edu.co/ (Congreso Visible, a website that gathers information on parliament activities operated by the University of the Andes).10. They include Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Mike Pence, the Trump family, and more.11. An exception is “2020,” which was used in some of the key terms (e.g., EE.UU 2020 and elección 2020).12. I relied on all classification models available in RTextTools (Jurka, Collingwood, Boydstun, Grossman, & Atteveldt, Citation2013) that did not return all 0 or 1: support vector machines, glmnet, logit boosting, random forests, and regression trees. Because the data are imbalanced with only a small fraction of the posts related to the 2020 US election, I also tried using synthetic balanced samples based on Random Over-Sampling Examples (ROSE) (Lunardon, Menardi, & Torelli, Citation2014). For additional information about the classification process, see Appendix D.13. This step ensures that the final classification does not suffer from false positives – i.e., posts that were not about the 2020 US election are coded as 1.14. For some analyses on the different types of tweets, see Appendix E.15. The data is based on the National Civil Registry. See https://elecciones.registraduria.gov.co:81/elec20180311/.16. These variables were collected from the parliament websites and Congreso Visible. Descriptive statistics are in Appendix G.17. The model includes MPs who posted something in the period under study.18. I obtain the same result using MPs’ vote shares in the US constituency. See Appendix H.19. I explore two additional implications of the electorally based argument in Appendix I. First, MPs’ popularity among Colombian expatriates outside the US cannot explain their involvement in the 2020 US election. Second, there is some suggestive evidence that MPs who competed for diaspora votes but were not very popular in the US tended to avoid explicit pronouncements of their sides.20. But this suffers from selection bias because ordinary MPs’ actions on social media get less media attention than those of party and executive leaders.Additional informationNotes on contributorsTaishi MuraokaTaishi Muraoka is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica. He studies electoral politics, political institutions, and elite online communication.