Enfranchising Foreigners: What Drives Natives’ Willingness to Share Power?

Anna Maria Koukal, Reiner Eichenberger and Patricia Schafera

CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)

Abstract: Universal suffrage is a core element for the functioning of democracy. However, with growing international mobility, an increasing share of the resident population has no suffrage. This paper analyzes the conditions under which domestic citizens are willing to extend suffrage to foreign residents. We explore a new municipality level dataset of 35 Swiss referenda on the enfranchisement of foreigners at the cantonal level. The Swiss setting provides a unique laboratory for capturing the drivers of the enfranchisement of foreigners, as it allows for measuring the actual native electorate’s revealed preferences. We find evidence that perceived cultural and economic threats hinder the enfranchisement of foreigners.

Keywords: foreigners’ voting rights; political integration; threat hypothesis; democratization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J15 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hpe, nep-mig and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crema-research.ch/papers/2019-10.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
https://www.crema-research.ch/abstracts/2019-10.htm Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cra:wpaper:2019-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anna-Lea Werlen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).