Trends, Contertrends and Paradoxes in the Italian External Vote: The Case of the 2006 and 2026 Constitutional Referenda

This article examines the participation and voting behavior of Italian nationals living in the United States and Australia as expressed in the Italian constitutional referenda of 2006 and 2016. It does so by relying on voting data for subdivisions of the foreign constituency, country and consular districts and by engaging with the four-model paradigm of ex-ternal voter elaborated by Michael Lafleur and María Sánchez-Domín-guez as means for a better understanding of the dynamics of the Italian external vote. This article argues that Italian citizens’ voting behavior in these two countries hardly revealed a transnational approach to politics. Conversely, if read through the lens of the four-model paradigm, data suggest that external voters were more likely to support far-reaching constitutional reforms, regardless of the proponents’ political orientation, than their fellow citizens in Italy in the hope that their standing and image of expatriates within their host countries were going to improve