When Cleavages Travel: Transnational Updating in Turkish Diaspora Voting

Why do emigrants’ political preferences resemble those of peers at home? Research in political sociology suggests considerable stability in emigrants’ home-country political attitudes over the migration experience, yet central patterns and mechanisms of this transnational continuity remain unclear. This article distinguishes enduring effects of initial political socialization from ongoing transnational influence as explanations for continuity. We argue that emigrants’ subnational regional origin provides a useful lens to disentangle both channels empirically and introduce the notion of transnational updating: the dynamic alignment of emigrants’ political preferences with evolving political patterns in their regions of origin. Transnational updating is indication of ongoing, active, and likely bottom-up links connecting home-regions and the diaspora. The empirical analysis substantiates these considerations focusing on the voting behavior of Europe’s Turkish diaspora in external elections. Drawing on longitudinal data that link birthplace information for more than 1.7 million Turkish emigrants in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to official election results for all Turkish elections and referenda between 2015 and 2023, we show that consulate-level voting outcomes closely mirror the regional origins of their electorates, demonstrating considerable continuity. Two-way fixed effects models further document that region-specific political shifts in Turkey are tracked abroad, consistent with ongoing transnational updating rather than static carryover alone. Supplementary survey analyses corroborate these patterns at the individual level. Our findings show that diaspora communities are neither fully politically resocialized abroad nor frozen in their premigration orientations. Instead, regional cleavages are dynamically reproduced across borders.