Multilevel Citizenship

Chapter 2 Denizen Enfranchisement and Flexible Citizenship: National Passports or Local Ballots?

Chapter 2 Denizen Enfranchisement and Flexible Citizenship: National Passports or Local Ballots? luicy pedroza It is obvious that the dynamics of migration have profound consequences for both sending and receiving societies. Yet the impact of significant immigration on the practices and understanding of citizenship in democracies fundamentally committed to fair and equal representation remains a puzzle, and not for lack of attention. A full-fledged body of literature— citizenship studies—has emerged, with rich normative and empirical analyses of citizenship that traditionally begin by declaring the fuzziness of the very subject. To paraphrase Linda Bosniak, for example, citizenship is a divided concept both rhetorically and normatively: it comprises distinct discourses designating a range of institutions and social practices that may overlap but are not always coextensive.1 Citizenship is at once a political principle of democracy that involves participation in decision making by political equals of a polity; it is a legal status that carries a set of specified rights and duties; it is a form of membership in an exclusive category that affords a social status and security of membership; finally, it is a pole of identification that can itself become rather thick and crucial in generating solidarity and civic engagement. Indeed, citizenship is all of these things, prioritized differently according to the preferred politico-philosophical stance. Lawyers, typically less troubled by contested sociological or philosophical definitions, offer unambiguous statements such as ‘‘The right to vote has come to define both the practice and the formal status of citizenship the world over. In many constitutional democracies, the right to vote 26 Luicy Pedroza is limited to formal citizens and, along with the right to remain, represents the chief attribute that gives content to the formal concept of citizenship.’’2 At first glance, the extension of the chief attribute of citizenship, political participation, to noncitizens across the world seems to suggest there is a readjustment of the several components of citizenship and even a dissociation of the right to vote from the other formal spheres of citizenship. The extension of voting rights to resident migrants seems like another battle for democratic and universal franchise, using the vocabulary of citizenship to question once again the criteria upon which political rights are distributed in a polity. Has political participation ceased to be a privilege of national citizens? What do enfranchising reforms and their spread across time and space suggest about the use of citizenship? This chapter addresses these questions by drawing insights from various theories, especially from historical institutionalist and liberal convergence theories on citizenship change, and contrasting them with original empirical findings. I develop two nested arguments: first, that there are various forms in which states combine and differentiate naturalization and denizen franchise. Thus denizen enfranchisement cannot simply be read as the decline of citizenship-as-nationality, even if these forms point to a fundamental disentanglement between them. Second, as voting rights are disentangled from national membership, states single out voting rights as an entitlement based on residence and contributions; potentially, this allows them to dissociate those rights from complex ideological questions supposedly rooted in nationality traditions that, according to historical institutionalism , are very hard to change. I substantiate these arguments by presenting and analyzing an overview of polities that extended voting rights to noncitizen residents through reforms at different levels (subnational or national), applicable at different levels of government (noncitizens may vote at the local level or at the regional or national level), and according to different levels of conditionality (universal extension or extension focused on certain groups of resident migrants). This overview is based on a data set I built from primary and secondary sources for 46 countries that has enlarged the overviews published so far, which focused mainly on European and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. I then elaborate on the patterns that can be found in those variations. Finally, I discuss what denizen voting rights mean for the practice and the conceptualization of citizenship when we look at cases with a broad comparative and empirical (2024-04-23 12:58 GMT) Denizen Enfranchisement 27 perspective instead of only at the same few cases from Western Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world, and only through the lens of naturalization regimes. I emphasize the level at which enfranchisement reforms commence to show that, in many cases, local governments have promoted their own concepts of citizenship in their enfranchising reforms.3 The Spread of Denizen Voting Rights: The Decline of Citizenship...