Voting Rights across Political Boundaries: Non-Citizen and Non-Resident Franchise in the EU

Abstract

Voting rights are often seen as the core of democratic citizenship and the most important rights that cannot be disconnected from formal citizenship status. While the empirical connection is still strong, it is no longer strict, as the local franchise for third country nationals in twelve EU member states and rights for foreign residents to vote in national elections in a handful of countries worldwide demonstrate. Parallel with the widening of the suffrage for non-citizen residents, there is a much stronger global trend to extend voting rights in national elections to non-resident citizens through absentee ballots, embassy or proxy voting. In the European Union, these trends are further compounded by voting rights for EU citizens in European Parliament and local elections. For this panel we invite papers that focus on access to voting rights across territorial borders and citizenship statuses from comparative as well as normative perspectives. We want to specifically discuss (1) the relation between access to citizenship status (through birthright or naturalisation) and to the franchise, (2) the political, legal and normative rationales for extensions of voting rights for different levels and types of polities (local, regional, state and European, (3) the legal and political dynamic in the EU and whether it could lead to further extending voting rights in national elections for EU citizens residing in other member states (through a franchise in their states of citizenship or residence), (4) participation rates and electoral impact of non-citizen and non-resident voting.

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