Voting Rights for Non-citizens: Treasure or Fool’s Gold?

Abstract

Proposals to extend the franchise to non-citizens have recently been defended on the basis of principles of democratic inclusion that challenge the sovereign authority of states to decide who may participate as a member in the democratic constituency. Here the requirement of extending the franchise to non-citizens is considered in the context of municipalities dominated by national minorities and in light of the claims of national minorities to self-rule. In these contexts, the settlement and enfranchisement of migrants sometimes dilute the strength and increase the costs of minority nationalist policies. The political dynamics created by extending voting rights to non-citizens where national minorities struggle for self-rule illuminate that moral arguments for extending voting rights to non-citizens can confuse two issues, the first being who has the right to participate in shaping the common projects of a democratic community and the second being whose interests should be considered in the course of decision making by that community. In these contexts, non-citizens have the right to have their interests considered and to have their rights taken seriously, but they may not have a strong claim to participate as voters in community decision making.In the last 30 years, efforts to enfranchise non-citizens who reside within territories dominated by national minorities have intensified political conflict where national minorities are engaged in ongoing political struggles for linguistic and cultural security within multinational states. In many of these struggles, national minorities seek jurisdictional authority over policies related to immigration and immigrant settlement in order to control the terms and conditions of admission of new members to the polity. For

Power sharing at the local level: evidence on opting-in for non-citizen voting rights

“…While our quantitative case study is embedded in an environment where people hold extensive experience with direct democracy, we think that there are at least two lessons that hold independently of this context. First, the opting-in regime can be seen as a social innovation that could be adopted also in other countries, and in fact has been discussed in the US context (Eisenberg 2015). Second, our empirical analysis tests for possible tensions regarding the support of non-citizen voting rights that would potentially also be at work (though less clearly observed and identified) in other places where non-citizen voting rights were introduced top-down.…”

Adminigration: City-Level Governance of Immigrant Community Members

“…22 Indeed, when we compared the frequency of words associated with identity categories across four iterations of the Mayville Housing Element, a component of the city's general plan, from 2000 to 2021, we saw a decrease in terms associated with race, ethnicity, and immigration and an increase in more generic terms, such as "people of color" and "inclusion." Such shifts suggest that attending to the rights of minoritized community members may be seen as an alternative to, rather than as consistent with, working on behalf of noncitizens (see also Eisenberg 2015).…”