UC Berkeley

This dissertation investigates policies implemented by governments in emigration states to incorporate their diasporas into the homeland political community. While some governments enact expansive policies that enable their diasporas to easily acquire citizenship, vote overseas, and access the policymaking process, others try to insulate homeland politics from diaspora influence. I refer to these three interlocking policies as diaspora political incorporation policies because they define the diaspora's relationship to the homeland political community. To explain variation in diaspora political incorporation policies, I pair data on global trends in citizenship, external voting rights, and diaspora representation with analysis of policy variation in Armenia, Croatia, and Serbia. These three countries have among the world's largest emigrant populations relative to domestic population. Moreover, they grappled with devastating wars and steep economic decline in the 1990s. Nevertheless, diaspora political incorporation policies sharply varied across these three cases as well as within each case over time.

While most scholars emphasize the homeland government's need for economic aid or foreign policy support from the diaspora, I argue that diaspora political incorporation policies are firmly anchored in electoral competition. Homeland politicians support expansive diaspora incorporation policies when said policies increase their parties' electoral resources, and reject them when their opponents benefit. The challenge for policymakers, who have limited knowledge of the diaspora's political contours, is to gauge the political impact of an expanded electorate and citizenry prior to enacting reforms. Lacking reliable data on diaspora political orientations, Armenian, Croatian, and Serbian politicians' perceptions of the diaspora as a political force were instead shaped by the manner of diaspora involvement in homeland affairs during communism's collapse. Two factors were particularly important: 1) whether the diaspora supported the anticommunist opposition in the homeland or competed independently, and 2) whether the diaspora's support was concentrated in one homeland party or was diffuse.