Integration Through Participation: Non-Citizen Resident Voting Rights in an Era of Globalization

Abstract

This paper examines institutional arrangements, which grant municipal voting rights to non-citizen residents of multicultural democracies and considers whether such arrangements are normatively compelling and practically useful as a way to achieve the multiculturalist aim of integration. Local voting rights have been granted to non-citizens in part as a strategy to integrate immigrants into mainstream democratic political life and thereby to avoid the radicalism that is sometimes the product of political exclusion and isolation. The author argues that the adoption of such arrangements in Canada and other multicultural democracies might not only provide newcomers with better opportunities to participate in decision-making processes that affect their interests – thus satisfying a democratic commitment to legitimacy – but that formal political participation by non-citizen residents might also encourage the development of the deliberative capacities and democratic commitments of those potential citizens. Indeed, the arrangements offer a democratic citizen apprenticeship that pursues a gradual integration of newcomers while being responsive to their claims and interests. The paper identifies and discusses certain barriers to non-citizen participation – including the comparatively lower socioeconomic status of newcomers and the lack of official language mastery – but it argues that inclusive, albeit unconventional, participatory arrangements may offer the best hope we have to overcome those circumstances and avoid newcomers’ slide into political cynicism.