External Voting in Times of Diplomatic Tensions: The Turkish Diaspora in Sweden, NATO, and the 2023 Presidential Elections

How do foreign policy disputes between host and home states affect external voting? Since the early 2000s, Turkey has adopted a proactive diaspora engagement policy to not only enfranchise nonresident citizens more effectively but also mobilize its diaspora during election campaigns. Scholarship has highlighted how such external campaigns may cause friction between home and host states, as this engagement potentially transgresses the boundaries between domestic and foreign politics and challenges concepts of community and sovereignty. Contributing to debates on state–diaspora relations and external voting, this article examines if and how the crisis in Turkish–Swedish bilateral relations following Sweden’s bid for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) may have factored into diaspora voting during the 2023 Turkish presidential elections. The article develops a framework for understanding how foreign policy becomes electorally salient in external voting contexts, arguing that such salience operates less as a direct determinant of vote choice but as a mechanism of political affirmation, boundary‑making, and identity consolidation. The study demonstrates that, while the NATO dispute was highly visible and discursively prominent during the campaign, it did not decisively alter voting preferences but reinforced pre‑existing political alignments within differently positioned segments of the diaspora.