Power sharing at the local level: evidence on opting-in for non-citizen voting rights
- PDF / 5,364,226 Bytes
- 30 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 30 Downloads / 172 Views
Power sharing at the local level: evidence on opting‑in for non‑citizen voting rights Alois Stutzer1 · Michaela Slotwinski1 Accepted: 29 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The enfranchisement of foreigners is likely one of the most controversial frontiers of institutional change in developed democracies, which are experiencing an increasing number of non-citizen residents. We study the conditions under which citizens are willing to share power with non-citizens. To this end, we exploit the setting of the Swiss canton of Grisons, where municipalities are free to decide on the introduction of non-citizen voting rights at the local level (a so called opting-in regime). Consistent with the power dilution hypothesis, we find that enfranchisement is less likely when the share of resident foreigners is large. Moreover, municipalities with a large language/cultural minority are less likely to formally involve foreigners. In contrast, municipality mergers seem to act as an institutional catalyst, promoting democratic reforms. A supplementary panel analysis on electoral support for an opting-in regime in the canton of Zurich also backs the power dilution hypothesis, showing that a larger share of foreigners reduces support for an extension of voting rights.
We are grateful to Jean-Thomas Arrighi, Joachim Blatter, Janine Dahinden, Johan Elkink, Eva Green, Dominik Hangartner, Ron Hayduk, Anita Manatschal, Lorenzo Piccoli, Didier Ruedin, Klaudia Wegschaider and the participants of the research seminar at the Immigration Policy Lab Zurich, the meeting of the NCCR - on the move as well as of the Max-Planck conference on citizenship for helpful comments. Special thanks go to Marco Hürzeler, Tobias Schib and Roman Uhlig for excellent research assistance. Furthermore, we thank Thomas Kollegger of the Amt für Gemeinden des Kt. Graubünden for his support of the Project. We acknowledge financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation and its National Center of Competence in Research The Migration-Mobility Nexus. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1060 2-020-09322-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Alois Stutzer [email protected] Michaela Slotwinski [email protected] 1
Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Basel, Peter Merian‑Weg 6, 4002 Basel, Switzerland
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
A. Stutzer, M. Slotwinski
Keywords Non-citizen voting rights · Opting-in · Power sharing · Democratization JEL Classifications D72 · D78 · J15 · K16
1 Introduction Over the last decades, international migration and mobility have led to an increase in the proportion of non-citizen residents in many democratic countries. This development has reignited a long-standing discussion about the extent of non-citizens’ formal inclusion in the democratic process, the focus being on the right to vote as a fundamental participatory aspect of democracy. Thereby, primary normative questions refer to whether
Data Loading...
