Citizenship, Right to Vote and Voter Turnout in Local Elections

• In Event: Socialization, Learning, and Voter Turnout

Abstract

Citizenship is a core requisite to participate in national elections. Citizenship also welcomes individuals into the community in full and we expect that individuals that are citizens of a nation are more interested in participating politically and care for the common welfare. In this paper we ask whether granting citizenship to an individual has an effect on voting in secondary local elections – both for the individual in question and for family members. We use rich Swedish register data, which includes individual level voter turnout and furthermore allows us to link family members together.

The Swedish setting includes certain institutional particularities we make use of in our research design. Immigrants in Sweden with residence permits have the right to vote in local elections, but only citizens may vote in the national elections. All elections do take place on one single election day. Those who are citizens on the election day thus have the right to vote, but electoral rolls are put together one month before the election, meaning that you need to be a citizen at that time in order to have the right to vote. We thus have three groups to compare: those who become citizens just after the election, and therefore do not have the right to vote; those who become citizens before the election, but not in time to be included in the electoral roll, and those who become citizens in time to be included in the electoral rolls, and therefore have the right to vote. By comparing the degree of voting in local elections between the three groups, we can separate the effect of citizenship from the entitlement to vote.

Authors

• Linuz Aggeborn, Uppsala University

• Henrik Andersson, Uppsala University

• Sirus Håfström Dehdari, Uppsala University

• Karl-Oskar Lindgren, Uppsala University