Incongruent Suffrage

Abstract

Candidacy rights and voting rights are not always congruent. While voting rights have been extensively studied, there is little work on candidacy rights. Historical and contemporary incongruencies in suffrage have thus been widely overlooked. We propose a typology of suffrage congruency that we apply to the enfranchisement of non-citizen residents and non-resident citizens—recently at the center of enfranchisement scholarship and efforts. Using an original dataset that covers 161 countries and 61 years (1960-2020), we identify past and present voting-only incongruencies, candidacy-only incongruencies, and partial incongruencies based on differing eligibility conditions. The divergences in candidacy and voting rights cannot be explained by standard electoral-interest explanations of the enfranchisement literature. Case studies of Switzerland and the United Kingdom underline that while voting-only incongruencies are intentional, candidacy-only incongruencies arise unintentionally. We close with a research agenda on the causes and consequences of suffrage incongruencies and candidacy rights.