![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
What explains the timing of the liberalization of citizenship laws? Although scholars have offered a number of competing explanations for differences among citizenship regimes, few have examined the timing of liberalization and retraction of rights for non-citizens. To investigate the timing of both liberalization and reversal, this study examines the historical expansion of voting rights for non-citizen residents (VRA). Given both the symbolic and substantive consequences of VRA, democracies may proceed slowly when liberalizing political rights and may retract them quickly. Two bodies of scholarship offer competing explanations. The “national resilience” thesis suggests that differences in cultural definitions of citizenry, political institutions, and social policies produce national citizenship regimes that evolve slowly. By contrast, the “policy constraints” thesis asserts that domestic institutions enact human rights norms that expedite convergence around a common set of political rights. This study tests these explanations by examining the timing of liberalization of VRA in 25 democracies between 1975 and 2010. It finds factors that drive the timing of liberalization differ from those that cause the reversal of rights. While policy constraints best explain the timing of liberalization, policy constraints interact with national resilience factors to explain the retraction of rights.
Notes on contributor
David C. Earnest, PhD is Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies in the College of Arts & Letters, and Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA. He is author of Massively Parallel Globalization: Explorations in Self-Organization and World Politics (SUNY Press, 2015); Old Nations, New Voters: Nationalism, Transnationalism and Democracy in the Era of Global Migration (SUNY Press, 2008) and co-author of On the Cutting Edge of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
Notes
1. Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State; Klausen, “Social Rights Advocacy and State Building”; Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development.
2. Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters; Earnest, “Neither Citizen nor Stranger”.
3. Howard, “Variation in Dual Citizenship Policies”; Howard, “Comparative Citizenship”; Howard, The Politics of Citizenship in Europe; Janoski, The Ironies of Citizenship; Koopmans et al., “Citizenship Rights for Immigrants”; Waldrauch and Hofinger, “An Index to Measure the Legal Obstacles”.
4. Bauböck, “Expansive Citizenship”; Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters.
5. Earnest, “Neither Citizen nor Stranger”; Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters.
6. Howard, The Politics of Citizenship; Janoski, The Ironies of Citizenship.
7. Earnest, “Neither Citizen nor Stranger”; Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters.
8. Some EU members interpret the treaty's “local” elections provision to include regional elections.
9. Howard similarly examines “the politics of partial liberalization” in the Federal Republic of Germany. See Howard, The Politics of Citizenship, 128–134.
10. Hayduk, Democracy for All; Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters; Aylsworth, “The Passing of Alien Suffrage”.
11. Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters, 68–71. One might argue that voting rights for supranational bodies, such as the European Parliament, should be a seventh type. Because only citizens of EU member state may vote in European Parliamentary elections, however, supranational voting rights in the EU reproduce the principle that citizenship is a qualification for the franchise. It is not a form of voting righs for non-citizen residents.
12. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, 5–6.
13. Joppke, “Citizenship between De- and Re-Ethnicization”.
14. Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, Citizenship Policies for an Age of Migration.
15. Multiculturalism Policy Index, 2013; Howard, The Politics of Citizenship; Huddleston, Migrant Integration Policy Index III; Janoski, The Ironies of Citizenship; Koopmans et al., “Citizenship Rights for Immigrants”; Waldrauch and Hofinger, “An Index to Measure the Legal Obstacles”.
16. Dong-shin, “Foreigners to Cast Ballots”; Sharp, “Disenfranchised”; Tong-hyung, “Foreigners Cynical about Voting Rights”.
17. Koopmans et al., “Citizenship Rights for Immigrants”.
18. Ibid., 1206.
19. Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State.
20. Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters; Howard, The Politics of Citizenship; Koopmans et al., “Citizenship Rights for Immigrants”.
21. Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters; Koopmans et al., “Citizenship Rights for Immigrants”.
22. See for example Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany.
23. Bloemraad, “Who Claims Dual Citizenship?”; Janoski, The Ironies of Citizenship; Renshon, Dual Citizenship and American National Identity; Spiro, “Dual Nationality and the Meaning of Citizenship”.
24. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany; Janoski, The Ironies of Citizenship; Howard, “Variation in Dual Citizenship Policies”; Howard, “Comparative Citizenship”; Howard, The Politics of Citizenship in Europe; Koopmans et al., “Citizenship Rights for Immigrants”; Waldrauch and Hofinger, “An Index to Measure the Legal Obstacles”; Huddleston, Migrant Integration Policy Index III; Multiculturalism Policy Index, 2013.
25. Helbling, “Validating Integration and Citizenship Policy Indices”.
26. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany.
27. National Citizenship Laws; Adams, The Basic Right of Citizenship; Kondo, “Comparative Citizenship and Aliens' Rights”; Nagy, “Citizenship in Hungary”; Weil, “Access to Citizenship”.
28. Bird et al., The Political Representation of Immigrants and Minorities; Green, “Between Ideology and Pragmatism”; Howard, The Politics of Citizenship in Europe; Janoski, The Ironies of Citizenship; Jones-Correa, “Under Two Flags”.
29. Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State.
30. Joppke, “Citizenship between De- and Re-Ethnicization”, 431–432.
31. Jacobs, “Immigrants in a Multinational Political Sphere”; Hollinger, “Sarkozy Supports Giving Immigrants a Vote”.
32. Blais et al., “Do Parties Make a Difference?”
33. Armingeon et al., Comparative Political Data Set III; Beck et al., “New Tools in Comparative Political Economy”; Woldendorp et al., Party Government in Forty-Eight Democracies.
34. Beck et al., “New Tools in Comparative Political Economy”. The country-year unit of analysis may lack sufficient temporal granularity to assess whether policy liberalization occurred before or after an election. Hence events that occur “simultaneously” in the data (that is, an election and a policy change occur in the same year of observation) may disguise a reversal of the causal sequence that hypothesis 3 proposes. To account for this possibility, I researched the dates of entry into force of the legislation for each liberalization and reversal event. In nine of the 25 events the democracy experienced a “simultaneous” election. Eight of those nine cases have a sequence is consistent with the conceptual expectation hypothesis 3: the policy change occurred before the election. The only policy change that reverses the sequence is Denmark's 1977 liberalization. Therefore, the election dummy variable was recoded for Denmark's 1977 election as occurring in 1976 to assure that the estimated effects accurately reflect the election as having occurred before the policy change.
35. Freeman, “National Models, Policy Types”.
36. Klausen, “Social Rights Advocacy and State Building”.
37. Huber et al., Comparative Welfare States Data Set.
38. Aleinikoff, “Policing Boundaries”; Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State.
39. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development.
40. Neuman, “We Are the People”.
41. Neuman, “We Are the People”; Raskin, “Legal Aliens, Local Citizens”; Harper-Ho, “Noncitizen Voting Rights”; Aleinikoff, “Policing Boundaries”.
42. Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy.
43. Howard, “Judicial Independence in Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe”; Skaar, Judicial Independence and Human Rights; Utter and Lundsgaard, “Judicial Review in the New Nations”.
44. Andrews and Montinola, “Veto Players and the Rule of Law”; Ha, “Globalization, Veto Players, and Welfare Spending”.
45. Armingeon et al., Comparative Political Data Set III; Keefer and Stasavage, “The Limits of Delegation”.
46. Rodden, “Comparative Federalism and Decentralization”, has found that existing measures of federalism and veto points may be unreliable. Consequently, one should interpret the following hypothesis tests with caution.
47. Timmer and Williams, “Immigration Policy Prior to the 1930s”.
48. Jacobs, “Immigrants in a Multinational Political Sphere”.
49. One consequence of this estimation strategy is that the border effects variable may suppress other spatial effects. For example, states with large reciprocal migration flows may be more likely to enact treaties that reciprocate VRA to each other's émigrés. Therefore, the remaining estimates in the model may be biased.
50. Beck, “Time-Series-Cross-Section Data”; Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters.
51. Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters, 145–148.
52. Gastil, “The Comparative Survey of Freedom”; Karatnycky, “The 2001–2002 Freedom House Survey of Freedom”; Marshall and Jaggers, Polity IV Project.
53. Diamond, “A Report Card on Democracy”.
54. Norris, “Designing Democracies”.
55. Earnest, “Neither Citizen nor Stranger”; Earnest, Old Nations, New Voters.
56. Because the sample includes states that democratized after 1975 (Uruguay and Hungary among others), the dataset excludes observations from these states before they democratized.
57. Box-Steffensmeier and Jones, “Time is of the Essence”.
58. The two types of events – liberalization and reversal of VRA – suggest that a competing risks model is more appropriate than separate models for the two events. However, to my knowledge existing estimators of competing risks cannot accommodate multiple failure events. If one were to estimate a competing risks model, the results would lose information about “stepped liberalization” or subsequent liberalizations that are theoretically important, such as Denmark's 1981 expansion of rights, Ireland's adoption of national rights in 1984, and Finland's liberalization in 1991. Therefore, I estimate separate hazard models accommodating multiple liberalizations or reversals.
59. Box-Steffensmeier and Jones, “Time is of the Essence”.
60. Earnest, “From Alien to Elector”.
61. For example, see Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State versus Neuman, “We Are the People”.
62. Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State; Joppke, “Citizenship between De- and Re-Ethnicization”.
63. Neuman, “We Are the People”. Alternatively, this finding may be biased due to the small number of cases. More specifically, Germany's court-ordered reversal of VRA may have a disproportionate effect on the estimates that would disappear in a larger sample of retraction cases.