Research
Poster encouraging Zimbabweans living in South Africa to vote in the 2013 general elections. Johannesburg, July 2013.
Most debates over contemporary migration focus on issues of legal status, political participation, and belonging in receiving countries. My research investigates these issues from the other side of the border: sending countries and their emigrant citizens.
I use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods and data sources, including creating and analyzing original cross-regional and global datasets, interviews with key decision-makers, migrant focus groups, multi-sited surveys, archival documents, and field experiments, to answer questions about voting rights, political behavior, and migration governance in an era of unprecedented global mobility. My research is transnational, collaborative, and reflexive.
Publications
Whitaker, Beth Elise and Elizabeth Iams Wellman. 2024. Voice Through Votes and Remittances: Diaspora Efforts to Influence Elections. International Migration Review, OnlineFirst.
Tenerowicz, Gates and Elizabeth Iams Wellman. 2024. The Social Impact of COVID-19 on Migrants in Urban Africa. Urban Forum, OnlineFirst.
Allen, Nathan and Elizabeth Iams Wellman. 2024. Extending Voting Rights to Emigrants: A Global Analysis of Actors, Processes and Outcomes. Diaspora Studies, 17(1), 1-17.
Wellman, Elizabeth Iams. 2023. Refugee Status as a patronage good? The interaction of transnational party mobilization and migration Policy in the global south. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Wellman, Elizabeth Iams, Nathan Allen, and Benjamin Nyblade. 2022. The Extraterritorial Rights and Restrictions Dataset (1950 – 2020). Comparative Political Studies, 56(6), 897-929. Dataset and Replication Files. Best Article Award, APSA Migration & Citizenship Section, 2023.
Nyblade, Benjamin, Elizabeth Iams Wellman, and Nathan Allen. 2022. Transnational voting rights and policies in violent democracies: a global comparison. Comparative Migration Studies, 10, 27.
Herman, Biz ⓡ, Panin, Amma, Wellman, Elizabeth Iams, Blair, Graeme, Pruett, Lindsey D., Opalo, Ken O., Alarian, Hannah M., Grossman, Allison, Tan, Yvonne, Dyzenhaus, Alex P., and Owsley, Nicholas. 2022. Field Experiments in the Global South: Assessing Risks, Localizing Benefits, and Addressing Positionality. PS: Political Science & Politics, 1-4.
Wellman, Elizabeth Iams. 2021. Emigrant Inclusion in Home Country Elections: Theory and Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa. American Political Science Review, 115(1), 82-93. Dataset and Replication Files. Best Article Award in African Politics, African Politics Conference Group, 2022. Best Article Award (Honorable Mention), APSA Migration & Citizenship Section, 2022.
Wellman, Elizabeth Iams and Beth Elise Whitaker. 2021. Diaspora Voting in Kenya: A Promise Denied. African Affairs, 120(479), 199-217.
Wellman, Elizabeth Iams, Susan D. Hyde, and Thad E. Hall. 2018. Does Fraud Trump Partisanship? The Impact of Contentious Elections on Voter Confidence. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties 28(3), 330-348. Best Paper published in JEPOP (Honorable Mention), 2018.
Wellman, Elizabeth Iams. 2015. Diaspora Voting in South Africa: Perceptions, Partisanship, and Policy Reversal. Afrique contemporaine (4), 35-50.
Working Papers
“Diaspora Voting: A New Item on the ‘Menu of Manipulation?’” (with Nathan Allen). Presented at 2024 CPSA.
“Travel Voting” (with Victoria Finn and Sebastián Umpierrez de Reguero). Presented at 2024 IMISCOE.
“Here and There, Near and Far: The Local and Temporal Dynamics of Transnational Political Participation in Urban Africa.” Presented at 2022 APSA.
“Getting Out the Overseas Vote: A Transnational Field Experiment” (with Michael Ahn Paarlberg). Presented at 2017 MPSA, 2020 APSA.
How Immigration Issues are Steering South Africa’s 2024 Elections. Good Authority, May 28, 2024.
Voter Suppression Goes Global, with Elizabeth Iams Wellman (No. 12). Scope Conditions audio podcast, hosted by Yang-Yang Zhou and Alan Jacobs, University of British Columbia. April 5, 2021.
The United States Has a Democracy Problem: What Democratic Erosion Scholarship Tells Us about January 6 (with Christina Kulich). Social Science Research Council Items, January 26, 2021.
Voice after Exit: Diaspora Voting in Africa. African Politics Conference Group Newsletter 2018.
South Africa’s Tough Lessons on Migrant Policy (with Loren Landau). Foreign Policy Democracy Lab, October 13, 2015.