 Though some states do extend voting rights to resident noncitizens at the local  level[28],  it is the growing extension of voting rights to nonresident citizens over the last decades that is particularly striking (Pogonyi 2014). It shows the persistence of a conception of membership premised on understanding the nation-state as a historical community of citizens with common values and shared ethno-cultural traits. On this view, voting rights are not understood territorially, but follow the citizen when she settles outside of her home country. Though one can understand some of the pragmatic reasons that often motivate certain states in recognizing voting rights to expatriates (e.g. acknowledging and encouraging their continued contribution to the home country through payment of remittances), normative theorists have been mostly critical of this phenomenon (see especially Lopez-Guerra 2005). In particular, the policy followed by certain states in the former socialist federations (USSR and Yugoslavia) of recognizing voting rights to co-ethnics residing in territories integrated in neighbouring independent states, as well as the more recent decisions by states like Hungary and Romania to extend voting rights to trans-border ethnic kin populations, should alert us to the dangers to regional stability that the “re-ethnicization of citizenship” involve (Joppke 2005, cited by Pogonyi 2014). Moreover, where the electoral system is not designed to limit the potential political impact of the nonresident electoral body, external voting may effect the “resident constituency’s right to democratic self-determination” (Pogonyi 2014, 135-136).