‘When do states give voting rights to non-citizens? The role of population, policy, and politics on the timing of enfranchisement reforms in liberal democracies’

ABSTRACT

Today the inclusion of non-citizens in the electorate is an increasingly common phenomenon. Yet, we know relatively little about under what conditions some states extend such voting rights to non-citizens earlier than others. In this paper, we investigate the timing of local enfranchisement policies for non-citizens in 28 democracies from 1980 to 2010 using event-history analysis. Adding to the conditions studied in earlier work, we examine the extent to which demographic composition, immigration policy regimes, and political partisanship relate to the timing of non-citizen suffrage. We find that higher shares of immigrant residents delay whereas EU membership and economic openness advance the timing of voting rights for non-citizens. At all demographic heterogeneity conditions, less permissive immigration regimes have been able to enfranchise non-citizens earlier. The findings suggest that, over time, having more left-wing parties in the government accelerates the timing of enfranchisement, while right-wing parties contribute to delays. The article brings forward new data and an original explanatory framework emphasising relevance of partisanship and immigration policy at different demographic contexts. Our analysis sheds light on the idiosyncratic state practices in the timing of enfranchisement reforms adding to the debates in migration and citizenship studies and the broader comparative politics field.

KEYWORDS:

• Voting rights
• immigration policy regime
• immigration
• political partisanship
• event history analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Other arguments of transnationally driven policy convergence are international norm diffusion and ‘parallel path development’ or policies (Cook-Martin and FitzGerald 2019; Turcu and Urbatsch 2014). While there is little evidence supporting such dynamics for non-citizen voting rights, they are found to be relevant in emigrant voting rights and (dual) citizenship policies.

2 We are aware that the year of legislation may not necessarily correspond to the implementation year in the next relevant election. However, we contend that legislation year is the necessary indicator of reform timing when studying conditions of such policymaking.

3 Figure A1 visualises the cases in our observation period.

4 Hazard life table in the Table A2 further illustrates these trends.

5 We alternate our strategy and construct a dummy variable by collapsing the former two options, see Table A26.

6 KOF index correlates strongly (r=0.7867) with a simpler measurement of memberships to international organisations.

7 We also check for influential cases, see Figures A11–A13.

8 See Table A11 for raw coefficients.

9 For a detailed discussion and data see pp. 7–10 in the appendix.

10 While substantive effects remain the same, the p-value of right-wing partisanship is sensitive to our coding of border cases, see Table A22 and A23. However, this difference is arguably in great part due to the changes in the number of failures and subsequent loss of statistical power.