🚨 New Working Paper with R.Bauböck + @sumpierrez.bsky.social We introduce the concept of incongruent suffrage. This describes when there are voting rights but no candidacy rights for a group. Or vice versa. The paper includes descriptive data & exploratory case studies. doi.org/10.33774/aps...

Suffrage incongruency represents an empirical and normative puzzle. 🧩 Empirically, existing theories of suffrage expansion struggle to explain incongruency. 🧩 Normatively, incongruency sits unwell with the idea of suffrage equality.

For non-citizen residents, we find that slightly more than half of countries with local suffrage provide both voting + candidacy rights. The remaining cases only offer voting rights but not candidacy rights. There are no cases of candidacy-only incongruencies.

With the help of two case studies, based on in-depth archival fieldwork, we explore why incongruency arises. 🇬🇧 UK: only candidacy rights for non-residents until mid 1980s 🇨🇭Switzerland, canton Geneva: only voting rights for non-citizens

Why did non-resident citizens of the UK have candidacy rights before voting rights were added? This suffrage incongruency was an unintended consequence of an electoral law written before the idea of non-resident candidates was meaningful. It is an example of policy drift.

Why did non-citizen residents of the canton of Geneva gain voting but not candidacy rights? The existing electorate was more supportive of immigrant enfranchisement excluding voting rights. Public support is crucial in direct democracies, but it is also relevant in representative settings.

We close with a research agenda on suffrage incongruency: 1) documenting: how common are divergences in voting + candidacy rights across demographic groups? 2) explaining: why do they arise? 3) what is the impact of incongruency on existing and new voters?