Franchise Dyads: Connecting the Study of Immigrant and Emigrant Electoral Rights

Most work on migrant enfranchisement looks at either immigrant or emigrant enfranchisement. In reality, these electoral rights are linked through the migrant experience, the policy-making processes, and their normative grounding. We present the so-far most comprehensive dataset on migrant enfranchisement laws. Our dataset contains information on candidacy and voting rights for both non-citizen residents (mostly immigrants) and non-resident citizens (emigrants and their descendants in certain cases)---covering 155 countries and stretching from 1960 to 2020. The combination of emigrant and immigrant electoral rights in one dataset opens new options for combined analysis. Specifically, we present a migrant-centred conceptualization that accounts for the rights in the country of residence and the country of citizenship. We arrive at six empirically relevant franchise constellations: 1) full franchise, 2) multilevel transborder franchise, 3) multilevel within-country franchise, 4) monolevel transborder franchise, 5) monolevel within-country franchise, and 6) no franchise. We complement this framework with descriptive data from our original dataset to map the frequency of these constellations of migrant (dis)enfranchisement. We close with a research agenda calling for work that situates migrants in specific franchise and citizenship constellations.