This paper argues that it is essential to place the legal framework governing the political participation of EU citizens in elections on the basis of residence in its wider context. This allows us to address a number of key questions about the evolving nature of citizenship in the European Union and its Member States, and about how more abstract debates about the intersection of sovereignty, citizenship and suffrage can mix with the politics and policies of immigration and immigrant incorporation in host polities. The scope of voting rights is a regularly contested issue within most polities – if not always at the macro constitutional level, then certainly at the level of implementation and especially in relation to mobilisation around such rights. Voting rights for resident non-citizens start to look particular threatening in any polity where they start to make a difference, hence there is often a delicate conversation to be pursued where polities both uphold the political participation rights of persons who position might be construed as citizens-in-waiting and, at the same time, seek to encourage those same persons to become full members of the polity through the process of naturalisation.
