Voici les éléments 1 - 10 sur 13
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Political Participation of Refugees: Bridging the Gaps
    (Stockholm International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), 2018-5-8)
    Antara, Lina
    ;
    Bekaj, Ahmed
    ;
    Adan, Tarig
    ;
    ;
    El-Helou, Zena
    ;
    Mannix, Ezra
    ;
    Mpeiwa, Mukondeleli
    ;
    Otieno Opon, Caleb
    ;
    Ragab, Nora
    ;
    Sharifi, Jaib
    ;
    Zakarian, Tigranna
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Foreigners, Citizens and the Tyrannical Edges of the ‘Vox Populi’: Empirical and Normative Evidence from Switzerland
    (Barcelone Université Pompeu Fabra GRITIM, 2017)
    The debate on the tyrannical consequences of direct democratic rule on minority rights is almost as old as democracy itself. Yet, it has regained considerable vigour in recent years, as the ‘plebiscitarian turn’ widely observed in Europe and North America has shaken to the core the very foundations of representative democracy as laid out since 1945. The article examines the issue in the case of immigrant minorities in Switzerland, that concentrates about half of referendums worldwide. It proceeds in two steps. First, based on an original dataset compiling all forty-three referendums and popular initiatives on migration-related issues held in Switzerland at federal level between 1848 and 2017, it examines through a rational-choice institutionalist lens whether direct democratic instruments have contributed to 'expand' or 'restrict' the rights of immigrants. The results point to a significant ‘tyrannical’ effect of direct democracy, both at the ‘agenda-setting’ and ‘decision-making’ stages. The second section takes a normative turn and critically discusses the democratic legitimacy of a political franchise that excludes the very population that is most intimately and immediately coerced by electoral outcomes. It proposes a ‘realist’ reform of the referendum procedure based on the ‘principle of empathy’, the aim of which is to complement the norm of national self-determination underlying the national franchise in Switzerland as well as in most democracies with an objective examination of and due respect for the ‘rights of others’.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    'The people, year zero' : secessionism and citizenship in Scotland and Catalonia
    The article compares how secessionist elites in Scotland and Catalonia discursely and legally constituted the people that is the subject of their claim of self-determination in relation to immigrant and emigrant populations during their recent bid for independence (2012-2017). The results point to important similarities between the two cases, which privileged the territorial inclusion of immigrants over the ethnocultural inclusion of emigrants and embraced the principle of multiple nationality. The outcome is interpreted as a sub-set of a broader ‘independence lite’ strategy, serving the aim of reducing the prospective cost of independence in the eye of the population they seek support from, and of the international community of states they seek recognition from.
  • Publication
    Restriction temporaire
    Report on political participation of mobile EU citizens : France
    (Florence, Italy European University Institute, 2018-8-25)
    This report explores challenges to political participation of mobile EU citizens in France. It discusses electoral rights of non-resident citizens and non-citizen residents from the EU in European Parliament and local elections. The report also offers recommendations on how to increase political participation of mobile EU citizens in this country.
  • Publication
    Restriction temporaire
    Non-universal suffrage : measuring electoral inclusion in contemporary democracies
    (2019-2-14)
    Schmid, Samuel
    ;
    Piccoli, Lorenzo
    ;
    The electoral franchise has become more universal as restrictions based on criteria such as sex or property have been lifted throughout the process of democratisation. Yet, a broad range of exclusions has persisted to this date, making the suffrage non-universal, even in established democracies. In this article, we present ELECLAW, a new set of indicators that captures the subtle and variegated legal landscape of persisting electoral rights restrictions. We measure the inclusiveness of the right to vote and the right to stand as candidate across four levels and three types of elections for three categories of voters: citizen residents, non-citizen residents, and non-resident citizens. ELECLAW currently covers fifty-one democracies in three different continents (the Americas, Europe, and Oceania) depicting the legal situation in 2015. The article introduces the methodology used for building the indicators so as to make it transparent to the broader research community. To this aim, it successively unpacks the conceptualisation underlying the indicators, explains the measurement by providing specific examples, and discusses the merits of a differentiated and context-driven method of aggregation.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Diaspora Policies, Consular Services and Social Protection for French Citizens Abroad
    (Cham: Springer, 2020) ;
    Lafleur, Jean-Michel
    While predominantly a country of immigration, France also counts with a sizeable population of citizens abroad of around three million individuals (4% of the domestic population). This chapter provides a general overview of France’s diaspora institutions, consular policies and social protection policies for citizens abroad. It describes in detail expatriates’ conditions of eligibility and access to welfare in the areas of unemployment, health care, pensions, family benefits and economic hardship. It shows that France, by European standards, has a comparatively strong level of engagement with its expatriates, particularly in the areas of electoral rights, culture and social protection. This must be understood in the light of France’s colonial history, its continued ambition to be a global actor, and its well-developed domestic welfare state that has increasingly become de-territorialised.
  • Publication
    Restriction temporaire
    SWISSCIT index on citizenship law in Swiss cantons : conceptualisation, measurement, aggregation
    (Neuchâtel Université de Neuchâtel Nccr on the move, 2018) ;
    Piccoli, Lorenzo
    In the Swiss federal context, the acquisition of citizenship through ordinary naturalization, the enjoyment of electoral rights as a foreign resident, and the retention of the franchise as a Swiss citizen abroad is not uniformly defined through a single federal law but co-determined by the cantons. In this explanatory note, we introduce SWISSCIT, a set of indicators measuring how inclusive cantonal citizenship policies are through a systematic comparison of the legislation in force as of 31 December 2017 in the 26 cantons. The dataset comprises three separate aggregated indicators, measuring the legislation on 1) ordinary naturalization of foreign residents; 2) the right to vote and stand as candidate of foreign residents in local and cantonal elections; and 3) the right to vote and stand as candidate of Swiss citizens abroad in their municipality and canton of origin. The note successively discusses issues of conceptualization, measurement and aggregation. By making our methodology fully transparent, we follow what has become common practice in index-building and hope to encourage users to make use of our data in their own research.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    “Keeping Pandora's (ballot) box half-shut”: a comparative inquiry into the institutional limits of external voting in EU Member States
    (2015-2-3) ;
    Hutcheson, Derek
    The article compares the institutional constraints that limit the potential electoral impact of external voting in national legislative elections in the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU). It shows that the discrepancy between policy aims and outcomes can be mainly attributed to a variety of institutional constraints restricting the scope of the policy (through residence and professional qualifications); limiting eligible voters’ access to the ballot (through cumbersome registration procedures and voting methods); and reducing the electoral weight attributed to their votes (through distinct modes of representation). It argues that the discrepancy is at least partly the result of a combination of electoral and normative concerns about the influence that external voters could and should have in elections. Institutional restrictions on the franchise of external citizens may be interpreted as a way to keep the “Pandora's box” of unexpected electoral consequences half-shut, by extending the suffrage to a traditionally excluded electorate while at the same time moderating the implications.
  • Publication
    Restriction temporaire
    A multilevel puzzle: Migrants’ voting rights in national and local elections
    (2017-7-8) ;
    Bauböck, Rainer
    How does international migration impact the composition of the demos? Constitutional doctrines and democratic theories suggest contrasting responses: an insular one excludes both non‐citizen immigrants and citizen‐emigrants; a deterritorialised one includes all citizens wherever they reside; a postnational one includes all residents and only these. This article argues that none of these predicted responses represents the dominant pattern of democratic adaptation, which is instead a level‐specific expansion of the national franchise to include non‐resident citizens and of the local franchise to include non‐citizen residents. This is demonstrated by analysing an original dataset on voting rights in 31 European and 22 American countries, and outlining a level‐sensitive normative theory of citizenship that provides support for this pattern as well as a critical benchmark for current franchise policies. The findings can be summarised in two inductive generalisations: (1) Voting rights today no longer depend on residence at the national level and on citizenship of the respective state at the local level; (2) Voting rights do, however, generally depend on citizenship of the respective state at the national level and on residence at the local level. In the article, these are called the patterns of franchise ‘expansion’ and ‘containment’. The former supports the idea of widespread level‐specific expansion of the franchise and refutes the insular view of the demos. The latter signals corresponding level‐specific restrictions, which defeats over‐generalised versions of deterritorialised or postnational conceptions of the demos. In order to test how robust this finding is, cases are analysed where the dominant patterns of expansion have been resisted and where unexpected expansion has occurred. With regard to the former, the article identifies constitutional and political obstacles to voting rights expansion in particular countries. With regard to the latter, the article shows that even where national voting rights have been extended to non‐citizen residents, containment remains strong through indirect links to citizenship.