➡️📍📑 New Working Paper
with
@sumpierrez.bsky.social and Rainer Bauböck
Work on migrant voting rights often has a state-centric perspective. We propose *migrant franchise constellations* as a migrant-centric approach.
A 🧵 with our argument and new data! 🗳️
preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/...Migrant* voting rights result from specific combinations of countries:
1️⃣ does the country of citizenship offer voting rights from abroad?
2️⃣ does the country of residence have non-citizen voting rights?
(defined as non-citizen residents who are also non-resident citizens; full disclaimer in paper)
An example:
🇿🇦 🇬🇧 A citizen of South Africa who is resident in the UK can vote in both countries.
🇺🇾 🇬🇧 A citizen of Uruguay who is resident in the UK cannot vote in either country.
Our typology is based on combinations of voting rights in the country of citizenship (CC) + residence (CR).
It considers local + national rights in the CR and national rights in the CC.
The most inclusive constellation contains all the above voting rights. The least inclusive type has none.
How does this play out empirically? 🧐
How many country combinations (dyads) fall into each category? 📊
To answer this, we computed roughly 1.3m dyad-years, covering 172 countries and the years 1960 to 2020.
[ ⏰ Stay tuned for the upcoming electoral rights data release!]
1️⃣ In the 1960s, more than 90% of our country combinations left migrants completely disenfranchised.
2️⃣ By 2020, the *no franchise* constellation still made up roughly 30% of the dyads in our sample.
3️⃣ The currently most common constellation offers national voting rights in the citizenship country.
Can we estimate how many migrants are completely disenfranchised? 🤔
There is no reliable data on how many people meeting our definition fall into each dyad. 😕
The closest approximation is migrant stock data (many caveats!). Our estimate is that at least 74m remained fully disenfranchised in 2020.
Normative positions on migrant voting rights differ. My own take defies the for/against dichotomy.
But one thing is clear to me: I find it concerning if people are completely excluded from this core democratic right.
Especially in contexts where citizenship acquisition is highly restrictive.
Sep 9, 2025 22:29Back to our short paper: this is a preprint and won't be the last version. Comments welcome. Our thanks to everyone who helped us on the way here! 🙏
If you are attending APSA, you can learn more about this on Thursday at 12 pm. If not, check out the preprint. 😀
Thanks for reading this far!
PS: If you find this interesting, check out recent work by Vink, van der Baaren, and Reichel on dyadic data on dual citizenship acceptance.
