Voting Rights of Denizens and Expats: Adjusting Democracy Indices to the Age of Mass Migration

Abstract

Contemporary migration flows affect virtually all aspects of the social fabric, democracy included. Focusing their attention on the competitiveness aspects of the regime, comparative measurements of democracy have underestimated the complexity of the Dahlian dimension of inclusiveness, a sine-qua-non condition for defining a polyarchy. Firmly anchored in the literature and democratic theory, this measurement paper proposes a new index of inclusiveness: Electoral Residential Inclusiveness. This measure assesses how large the overlap between those who make the law and those who are subject to it is. It is shown how some regimes—including some of those that have been systematically considered strong democracies—exhibit such a considerable gap between these two groups that their democratic credentials should be questioned. This index has a clear impact on the way we measure and, most important, understand democracies. Unpacking this forgotten dimension, this work helps to fine tune the efforts to measure democracies.