Foreign Residents’ Registration in Municipal Elections in Belgium and in Luxembourg

Granting voting rights to foreign residents challenges the traditional notion of national citizenship. This contemporary “age of migrations” (Castles and Miller 2008) is deeply affecting the processes by which states allocate political citizenship and define the means of citizens’ political participation (Isin and Turner 2002, Bird 2010). After the Treaty of Maastricht, voting rights were granted to EC non-national residents in local and European elections and 17 European countries (including Belgium and Luxembourg) extended this right to third-country nationals for the local elections. However, due to the lack of available data, studies about the electoral participation of non-national residents are still limited and mainly qualitative. Previous research on the political participation of ethnic minorities routinely reveals that immigrants have lower levels of participation than the majority population, mainly due to their lower socio-economic status. So far, no works has provided an exhaustive study of the direct effect of possible explanatory factors on the electoral participation rate of foreign residents. The purpose of this paper is hence two-fold. 1) to explain the variation of registration’ rates between EU nationals and third-country nationals in the three Belgian regions and in Luxembourg; 2) to explain diachronically the evolution of foreigners’ registration rates between two sets of municipal elections. The main hypothesis is that foreigners’ registration is primarily influenced by the level of mobilization of the municipalities (organization of awareness raising campaigns) and, although to a lesser extent, by other determinants, such as socio-demographic and structural variables, political or institutional factors and variables related to migrants’ socialization. Empirically, this hypothesis will be tested through a multivariate analysis of a unique dataset combining both official figures at the municipal level and compiled and coded data on the number and the type of information campaigns organized by municipalities which I collected through a new survey.