Abstract
The fact that voting rights are often withheld from non-citizen residents leads the authors to revisit Joseph Carens’s stance on who has a legitimate claim to the rights that are usually associated with citizenship. It is argued that although Carens generally side-lines the idea of detaching the franchise from the bundle of citizen-exclusive rights, two of his main principles (namely the principle of democratic legitimacy and the social membership principle) in fact prompt such a detachment. This is because a coherent interpretation of both principles reveals them to stand in conflict with current naturalisation practices: a conflict which – as the authors demonstrate – is best resolved by severing the link between voting rights and citizenship.
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Notes
- 1.
There are a few exceptions: The UK and Ireland grant the right to vote in national elections to each other’s citizens, while only Barbados, Urugay and New Zealand allow the same thing for non-citizens which meet certain requirements (see Shaw 2017, 303).
- 2.
Le Portail des Statistiques. 2018. Population by Sex and Nationality on 1st January (x1000) 1981, 1991, 2001–2018. https://statistiques.public.lu/stat/TableViewer/tableView.aspx?ReportId=12853&IF_Language=eng. Accessed November 25th, 2018.
- 3.
Federal Statistical Office. 2018. Ständige Wohnbevölkerung nach Staatsangehörigkeitskategorie, Alter und Kanton, 3. Quartal 2018. https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/effectif-change.assetdetail.6866254.html. Accessed January 20th, 2019.
- 4.
This is not always readily apparent in Carens’s discussion. However, it becomes clear in a passage from The Ethics of Immigration where he shows how an individual right, such as the right to protection from deportation, follows from social membership. He only felt the need to demonstrate this link between membership and single rights, Carens says, because some people may not have been convinced by his earlier contention that social membership grounds a claim to the whole citizenship bundle (see EoI, 104).
- 5.
For further discussion of the possibilities for allowing non-residents to influence the decisions of a state see López-Guerra 2014, 95f.
- 6.
Balázs Majtényi, Alíz Nagy and Péter Kállai. 2018. “Only Fidesz” – Minority Electoral Law in Hungary. Verfassungsblog.de. https://verfassungsblog.de/only-fidesz-electoral-law-in-hungary/. Accessed January 20th, 2019.
- 7.
An example of this would be the concerns over the rule of law in Hungary that were voiced by the European Parliament in 2018, with the latter specifically directing attention to the issues of “[j]udicial independence, freedom of expression, corruption, rights of minorities, and the situation of migrants and refugees” (European parliament. 2018. Rule of law in Hungary: Parliament calls on the EU to act. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20180906IPR12104/rule-of-law-in-hungary-parliament-calls-on-the-eu-to-act. Accessed January 28th, 2019).
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Bonberg, F., Rensing, L. (2020). Voting Rights for Residents? Revisiting Carens’s Citizenship Rights. In: Hoesch, M., Mooren, N. (eds) Joseph Carens: Between Aliens and Citizens. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44476-1_5
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