Taxation with representation: Understanding natives’ attitudes to foreigners’ voting rights

Jérôme Gonnot

European Journal of Political Economy, 2022, vol. 71, issue C

Abstract: This paper examines theoretically natives’ decision to grant political rights to foreign residents based on their contribution to a redistribution mechanism that finances a private and a public good. I propose a model where agents’ redistributive preferences are determined by their income and cultural beliefs about public spending, which vary across nationalities. I show that under some conditions, low-income natives can gain politically from enfranchising foreigners that are richer than natives on average as long as these foreigners have sufficiently liberal beliefs towards public spending. Moreover, I establish that natives’ support for foreigners’ enfranchisement is a non-monotonic function of these foreigners’ income and cultural beliefs. Rather, these variables influence attitudes towards enfranchisement based on foreigners’ relative taste for the private and the public good. I also provide empirical results in support of my theory using a municipality-level dataset of Swiss referenda about non-citizen voting rights.

JEL-codes: D72 H41 H53 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:71:y:2022:i:c:s0176268021000574

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2021.102060

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