Working_papers

Referendums merit study as a distinct enfranchisement path. Within this path, simultaneous popular votes appear to influence vote share outcomes. This finding has implications for the study of referendums more broadly.

Incongruency between voting and candidacy rights has so far been overlooked. We propose the congruency principle, arguing that the candidacy and voting demoi should generally be identical to meet the democratic norm of self-government. Our focus is on non-citizen residents and non-resident citizens, who have recently been at the center of enfranchisement scholarship and efforts. We then assess whether the congruency principle is reflected in the empirical reality with an original dataset, covering 151 countries and sixty-one years (1960-2020). Though suffrage is mostly congruent, we find many contemporary and historical cases where only candidacy or voting rights are available. This divergence cannot be explained by the standard electoral-interest explanation of the enfranchisement literature. A Swiss and a UK case study underline that the dynamics of candidacy and voting rights are linked but not always identical. Candidacy rights thus merit study in their own right and in combination with voting rights.