Two paths towards the exceptional extension of national voting rights to non-citizen residents

1 ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.’ (Italics are own).

2 However, standing out among the contributions are Belton (Citation2019) on the Commonwealth Caribbean and Finn (Citation2020; Citation2023) in South America, specifically Chile, as well as other contributions in this Special Issue (Superti Citation2023; Wellman Citation2023).

3 Other countries extend voting rights for non-resident citizens, as indicated, but only for certain political spheres (local or intermediate). Some countries give the national vote, but it is restricted to particular nationalities such as Brazilians in Portugal or many Commonwealth countries.

4 We are not interested in non-resident citizens’ votes (overseas voting) or in the ease of acquiring voting right (e.g., achieved in five or 15 years), but rather on the existence of NCR rights.

5 As Ragin warns us, researchers ‘must carefully define their concepts before they can assess the degree of membership of cases in the sets corresponding to their concepts’ (Ragin Citation2000, 310).

6 QCA has tremendous advantages; among them, it allows the researcher to deal with variables in isolation or combination, sensitive to conjunctural causation, and allows for reconstructing chains of events. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the limitations of this analytical method; a downside lies in variable codification and measurement, not in the neat, logical, parsimonious technique that it represents.

7 1 represents countries that adopted the reform, 0 represents countries that did not adopt the reform, and a question mark represents a configuration for which we do not have cases, and therefore no outcome exists.

8 Three letter ISO codes are used to denote countries, followed by the year of the juncture (e.g., BOL09 denotes Bolivia in 2009).

9 While local voting rights were enacted in a prior law (Law No. 1585, August 12, 1994, approved by the Government of Sánchez de Lozada), it was not regulated until the constitutional reform. We consider Bolivia had local voting rights for residents at the moment of the critical juncture.