Casting Votes or Crossing Borders? How Living Abroad Reduces Mobile Europeans’ Likelihood to Participate in European Elections

Both freedom of movement and voting in European elections are fundamental citizenship rights at the heart of European integration. Ideally, EU citizens should be able to exercise both rights simultaneously. Yet, in practice, tensions exist between the two: Despite their strong emotional attachment to the Europe-an Union, EU citizens living outside their country of citizenship have a reduced likelihood to vote in European elections, even when they reside within the EU. This article demonstrates this pattern empirically for German emigrants in the 2019 European Parliament election, based on data from the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS). This survey is unique in that it covers both mobile German citizens who currently live abroad and those who have lived abroad, but have recently returned to Germany. Self-reported turnout was signif-icantly reduced among those currently living abroad. Bureaucratic hurdles (in-cluding early opt-in registration deadlines, complex registration procedures, and tedious access to ballot) are identified as a key explanation for the decreased par-ticipation. These findings seem to contradict basic democratic principles and could have political implications: Since there are more than eleven million mo-bile EU citizens who are eligible to vote, reduced turnout among this group could affect election outcomes.