Migrant Franchise Constellations

Abstract

Voting rights are no longer an exclusive privilege of citizens residing in the country. So how extensive is the franchise for international migrants? We present a migrant-centred framework that accounts for rights in the country of residence and the country of citizenship, differentiating a set of empirically relevant franchise constellations: full franchise, several forms of partial franchise, and no franchise. Drawing on the most comprehensive dataset on migrant electoral rights, combined with novel data on nationality-specific restrictions, we compute around 732,000 dyad-year observations across all country-years with meaningful elections between 1960 and 2020. In 2020, most dyads fell into the external-only constellation, meaning that migrants can only vote in their country of citizenship. Using migrant stock data, we also estimate the share of the global migrant population within each constellation. We find that at least 24 million of the subset of migrants living in and being citizens of countries with meaningful elections remained completely disenfranchised in 2020. Our dyadic analysis underlines that bilateral and multilateral efforts likely provide the most fruitful means for addressing global migrant disenfranchisement.