Discrepant Electorates: The Inclusiveness of Electorates and Its Impact on the Representation of Citizens

Using the MIPEX index that operationalise the easiness with which single nationalities can be acquired, we  see that besides Austria and Switzerland, also Germany, Denmark and Finland (as well as Italy and Spain) have naturalisation laws unfavourable to the incorporation of non-nationals in the electorate through the nationality law.The discussion so far leads us to conclude that electoral laws vary little with the exception of Ireland (as far as the electoral law on emigrants is concerned) and New Zealand (as far as the electoral law concerning immigrants is concerned). In regard to the acquisition of nationality and therefore the automatic access to political rights, again we find little variation concerning nationality law (emigrants). However, there is a large variation in naturalisation laws (immigrants). This information leads us to formulate the hypothesis that differences in the levels of discrepancy (between citizenship and electorates) are primarily caused by variations in naturalisation laws, and amplified by a large influx of immigrants...
Empirical results of the paper show that the main source of discrepancy between citizenship and electorate is the combination of high rates of non-national residents (immigrants) in countries in which naturalisation laws make it difficult to access nationality and thus voting rights. This large discrepancy is also not solved by electoral laws since these do usually not grant voting rights to non-nationals. Problems of representation are therefore strictly linked to conceptions of nationality  – who is a member of the  national community and who is not  –and to conceptions of citizenship – who is a member of the political community and who is not. In principle, it would be possible to imagine changes in electoral laws granting voting rights to citizens  without making them nationals...Read more