Abstract
Diasporas, Voting and Linguistic Justice are significant new contributions to the literature on migration, citizenship, diaspora politics, and language policy. At the center of the book lies a deceptively simple yet demanding question: what responsibilities do states assume when they extend voting rights to non-resident citizens, especially descendants of emigrants who have never lived in the state in whose elections they may participate? The book offers a clear answer. Enfranchisement cannot be understood merely as a formal legal act. When a state grants voting rights, it must also take seriously the conditions that make voting meaningful. In the Italian case examined here, one such neglected condition is language competence, not simply as a marker of heritage or identity, but as a prerequisite for informed democratic participation.
One of the book's major strengths is its ability to connect three debates that are often treated separately: diaspora institutions, external voting, and linguistic justice. The authors demonstrate that the expansion of non-resident voting rights has outpaced serious reflection on whether voters possess the linguistic resources necessary to participate effectively in the political life of the sending state. Italy provides a particularly revealing case, as citizenship by descent and external voting regulations have created a large population of second- and third-generation citizens abroad who hold legal membership without necessarily possessing the literacy, fluency, or confidence required to engage with political information. In this respect, the book moves beyond the familiar question of whether diasporic citizens should vote and instead asks whether states have done enough to make such voting substantively fair.
The book is clearly organized and intellectually coherent. After introducing the relationship between voting rights, language competence, and political participation, the authors move through the emergence of diaspora institutions, the history of Italian migration to Australia, the development of Italian citizenship, and the normative and empirical core of the study. This structure is effective because the argument unfolds progressively rather than mechanically. The empirical chapters do not merely illustrate a previously stated theoretical claim; they also examine and test it. The result is a book whose structure reinforces its conceptual ambition.
The theoretical center of the study is its account of linguistic justice for non-resident citizens. Here, the authors address an important gap in literature. Much of the scholarship on linguistic justice has focused either on immigrants in receiving societies or on long-established linguistic minorities within state borders. Bonotti, De Lazzari, and Miragliotta argue that non-resident citizens constitute a distinct category that has not been sufficiently theorized. Once a state grants fundamental rights to citizens abroad, they contend, it also assumes the responsibility to enable them to exercise those rights meaningfully. In this context, language support is not merely part of cultural preservation; it becomes part of democratic inclusion. This is a convincing intervention and one of the key sources of the book's originality.
The book is further strengthened by its mixed-methods design. The authors combine normative political theory with an online survey of 204 eligible second- and third-generation Italo-Australians, 47 semi-structured interviews, and stakeholder interviews with representatives of diaspora institutions and media organizations. This methodological combination allows them to ground theoretical claims in lived experience and to show that the relationship between language and voting is not merely perceptual but institutionally and socially consequential. The data are handled carefully, and, importantly, the authors do not claim more than the evidence can support. Their acknowledgment that studying is not fully representative is an important methodological qualification.
Among the book's strongest empirical insights is the finding that many second- and third-generation Italo-Australians experience their Italian identity more in cultural than in political terms. Respondents often value their citizenship and recognize voting as a privilege, yet this recognition does not always translate into strong political engagement. The book is particularly useful in showing that legal membership and meaningful democratic participation are not the same. In this respect, it makes a valuable contribution to broader debates on transnational citizenship by raising the question of what, beyond legal entitlement, sustains political membership across borders and generations.
The analysis of language barriers is also one of the strongest parts of the book. The authors do not simply ask whether subsequent-generation voters can speak some Italian; instead, they focus on literacy, interpretation, and the ability to process political information, campaign messages, and ballot materials. Their distinction between language-acquisition barriers and voting-access barriers is especially valuable. The former includes financial costs, time commitment, motivation, lack of awareness, and narrow curricula, while the latter include technical political language and monolingual communication. This distinction is both analytically precise and policy relevant, as it shows that the issue cannot be reduced to a simple call for more heritage language education. It is fundamentally a question of democratic access.
At the same time, the book is not without limitations, and a stronger critical review must acknowledge them. First, its broader implications are more ambitious than its comparative scope. The authors suggest that their argument extends beyond the Italian Australian case, and this claim is plausible, but the comparative dimension remains limited. A more sustained engagement with other states that combine citizenship by descent with external voting would have helped distinguish what is specifically Italian from what may be generalized more broadly.
Second, although the empirical material is rich, it relies heavily on self-assessed language competence. This is understandable given the research design, but it does show a degree of uncertainty. The perception does not always correspond to actual ability, and this matters when the central issue is the capacity to function as an informed voter. Some readers may therefore wish for more direct evidence of literacy and comprehension.
Third, the normative argument at times moves too quickly from the fact of enfranchisement to the responsibilities that follow from it. The authors convincingly show that language matters for meaningful participation, but they engage less fully with stronger critiques of external voting itself. Critics who question whether non-residents should vote at all, or who argue that democratic stockholding should depend more heavily on residence, are acknowledged but not examined in depth. A more sustained engagement with this literature would have strengthened the book's normative force.
There is also an unresolved tension between the normative and empirical dimensions of the study. The authors argue that language is central to democratic agencies, yet participants themselves do not always prioritize language for explicitly political reasons. This tension does not weaken the book, but it does raise an important question that could have been explored further: if the democratic value of language is not always experienced subjectively by those concerned, on what basis should states prioritize it institutionally, especially under financial and organizational constraints?
Despite these reservations, Diasporas, Voting and Linguistic Justice is a valuable and timely book. Its most important contribution is its insistence that voting rights must be assessed not only in terms of their formal extension but also in relation to the practical and linguistic conditions that make their exercise meaningful. By bringing linguistic justice into discussions of diaspora politics, the authors open an important line of inquiry for migration studies, political theory, and citizenship scholarship. This book will be of interest to scholars, graduate students, and policymakers alike, and it is particularly noteworthy for the way it reframes the relationship between transnational membership and democratic justice.