Parlamentissa vai ulkona? : ulkosuomalaisten poliittinen representaatio

Kirjoittajat

• Johanna Peltoniemi

Abstrakti

Globalisation and increased mobility of people have led political representation in need of to con-front new demands. Political terrain has become less confined within state territoriality, and political community has extended beyond state territories. Emigrant representation has become increas-ingly important and visible, albeit difficult topic, and re-evaluation of the means of emigrant politi-cal representation is necessary. Based on a literary review of political representation, the aim of this article is to find out 1) Should Finnish emigrants have their own overseas constituency, and 2) How the representation of emigrants could be organised in homeland politics. Statistical analyses are based on a data collected from 1,067 Finnish emigrants in 2014. This paper demonstrates through logistic regression that overseas constituency has strongest support among emigrants who have lived longer time abroad as well as among emigrants who visit homeland less frequently. However, parliamentary representation is not the only way to organise emigrant representation in homeland politics. Possible inequality in parliamentary representation could be unravelled by three different means: by quotas and reserved seats; by surrogate representatives, or; by increasing the authority of NGOs, interest groups and lobbyist organisations. This study contributes to the fields of political and migrations studies, and the findings of this paper can be used to develop targeted interventions aimed at advancing emigrant representation.