Democratic Inclusion and the Disentanglement of Electoral Rights

The question of how voting rights can be justified, and possibly legitimately restricted (usually on the basis of young age, intellectual disabilities, criminal convictions, and migration status), has been thoroughly addressed by political theorists in the past few decades. Comparatively little attention has been devoted, however, to another facet of electoral inclusion that is critical to representative democracy, which has been labeled as the “right to run for office” (Rehfeld: 2009), the “right to candidacy” (Johns: 2016), or the “right to stand” (Lever and Mraz: 2022; Lever: 2023). In this paper I aim to provide an assessment of this right, together with its legitimate restrictions, by focusing on its normative underpinnings and its correspondence with the right to vote. First, I maintain that there are three views that can be taken in respect to the allocation of voting and candidacy rights: (1) a symmetrical view that requires that identical restrictions are imposed on both, (2) an asymmetrical view that imposes less restrictions on candidacy rights than on voting rights and (3) an asymmetrical view that imposes more restrictions on candidacy rights than on voting rights. I develop each view in turn and argue that all of them can be plausibly defended, depending on which aspects of democratic voting we focus on, namely on the political equality of autonomous members of the community, on the authority of the demos when it comes to fundamental political decision-making, or on the formation of relations of accountable representation between elected officials and electors. The upshot of this discussion is that the problem of allocating candidacy rights may ultimately lack a universal solution and can only be answered within the confines of a specific account of democracy and democratic voting. Second, I turn to real-world constraints on candidacy rights that do not ordinarily correspond to similar constraints on voting rights in contemporary democracies, such as disqualifications due to occupational status (e.g. for military personnel), due to a previous exercise of the right to hold elected office (in case of term limits), due to lack of proven support (e.g. if there is a requirement to collect a number of signatures to be eligible to stand), or due to certain demographic characteristics (e.g. if there are reserved seats for ethnic minorities). I argue that, in various ways, these kinds of restrictions are justified by appealing to considerations of democratic quality, rather than on what democracy would necessarily require as a matter of institutional design. Unlike the case of voting rights, I maintain that candidacy rights can be legitimately restricted in pursuit of democratic quality, as long as the restrictions are non-arbitrarily enforced and there is compelling empirical evidence supporting them. While these conditions may not appear particularly burdensome, they raise serious doubts as to the legitimacy of some real-world practices, such as higher age thresholds for candidacy rights than for voting rights, or the exclusion of naturalized citizens from certain elected offices.