Non-citizen voting rights and political participation of citizens: evidence from Switzerland

Elif Naz Kayran,Anna-Lena Nadler

doi:10.1017/s1755773922000029

Abstract

AbstractCan non-citizen enfranchisement policies reduce the turnout gap between citizens with an immigration background and native citizen voters? While increasingly common in practice, there are only a handful of studies on the political consequences of non-citizen enfranchisement on voter mobilisation. Here, we examine the impact of non-citizen voting (NCV) rights on the political participation of citizens with and without an immigration background. Focusing on Switzerland, we use high-quality household panel data (SHP) from 1999 to 2014, leveraging both longitudinal and municipal level variation of enfranchisement laws when identifying their effect on turnout. We show that NCV rights boost political participation overall, and it particularly enhances turnout among citizens with an immigration background. Our analysis adds to existing theoretical explanations and empirical debates on representation and political participation in diverse democratic societies with large immigrant populations.

Highlights

The pervasive decline of voter turnout rates in many advanced democracies and the social and political tensions that this trend poses have been well-documented in contemporary political science research (Blais and Rubenson, 2012)
This translates into an increase in participation in polls of 4 percentage points for natives and 7.5 percentage points for citizens with immigration backgrounds. What do these differential effects imply more concretely for the turnout differences between these groups? To inspect this, we look at the predicted participation rates between native citizens (NC) and citizens with an immigration background (CIB) using the random effects (RE) model that show us the predicted participation differences between groups in municipalities before and after cantons introduced voting rights applied to all municipalities and the differences between municipalities where cantons allowed for opt-in rules (Model 6)
Underlying logics of the participation boost among citizens with immigration background in the context of non-citizen enfranchisement Motivating our hypothesis 2, we suggested that non-citizen voting (NCV) rights policies are more likely to be salient among citizens with an immigration background than native citizens

Summary

Introduction

The pervasive decline of voter turnout rates in many advanced democracies and the social and political tensions that this trend poses have been well-documented in contemporary political science research (Blais and Rubenson, 2012). Turnout differences between citizens are often understood by referring to socioeconomic cleavages, education, demographic, socio-political and cultural factors (Smets and van Ham, 2013). When it comes to explaining weaker turnout amongst individuals with an immigration background, there is a growing consensus that bottom-up explanations, relying on individual characteristics, do not suffice (Bass and Casper, 2001; Simonsen, 2020; Filindra and Manatschal, 2020; Bratsberg et al, 2021). After decades of research on the topic of immigrant political representation, only a handful of studies have addressed

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