Between 1980 and 2020, more than 120 countries—Canada included—enfranchised emigrants. While the diffusion of democratic practices is a well-established international phenomenon, we know little about the domestic process. How does international policy diffusion influence domestic debate? To explain the structure of Canadian debate about emigrant voting rights, we draw on concepts from the constructivist literature on international norms. In examining the structure of normative discourse within a domestic context, we argue that emulation involves three rhetorical elements that can generate disagreement: (1) setting peer countries to emulate; (2) identifying existing policy positions; and (3) envisioning the preferred policy position vis-à-vis peers. We find that in the Canadian debate about emigrant voting, contestation increased over time; where only peer groups were contested in the early debates leading up to the initial 1993 enfranchisement, all three elements were contested when discussing the removal of temporal restrictions two decades later.
