The Negative Externalities of Regressive Citizenship Regimes on Voting

• In Event: Immigrant Political Participation and Voter Behavior in Host Societies

Abstract

Why do immigrant-origin citizens participate less in national elections? While there is a variety of research that attempts to answer this question, I add a spatial dimension. I analyze how and why immigrant-origin citizen participate less in elections when they live in neighborhoods with many non-citizens. The same is not true for citizens without migration background. Why is this the case? I show that in countries like Germany with very regressive and conservative naturalization and citizenship regimes, the share of disenfranchised residents (non-citizens of immigrant origin) per neighborhood is substantially large. Immigrant-origin citizens with weak or strong ties to mostly immigrant origin non-citizens tend to vote much less. This implies that regressive citizenship regimes can have substantial quasi-disenfranchising negative externality effects on full citizens with immigrant-origin background. Citizens without immigrant background do not show the same effect.

I test my argument using a multi-method approach. First, to address the potential issue of self-selection into neighborhoods I use original archival data to show how the German government distributed a large majority of immigrant workers (“guest workers”, “Gastarbeiter”) across Germany without these workers being able to influence the destinations. Second, I curated census data from the 1960s and 1970s at the district level on the distribution of these migrant workers across German districts. I use this data as an instrument for today’s non-citizen distribution. Third, I combined the historical data and contemporary data controlling for other neighborhood-level factors with the German GSS data (ALLBUS) from 1996 until 2016 and the Diversity and Contact panel (2010 and 2012, DivCon) to test my hypotheses.

To test the argument using surveys on the local level, I received access to the secure data center at GESIS in Cologne. This enabled me to use the exact locations of respondents in both data sets and add neighborhood- and district-level data. In the ALLBUS data I used data on 1km x 1km grids as the narrowest measure for neighborhoods. I show that immigrant-origin citizens tend to vote less in neighborhoods with many non-citizens. While the same does not hold for citizens without immigration background. To test the mechanisms, I relied on DivCon data. The survey is representative for a set of neighborhoods in German cities. The results imply that immigrant-origin citizens with many weak and strong ties to disenfranchised non-citizens tend to vote much less indicating negative externality effects of restrictive citizenship regimes.

I conduct an array of robustness checks to show that these effects are not driven by other neighborhood or individual-level factors. In particular, the results remain significant when instrumenting today’s percentage of foreigners with the distribution in the 1970s. Additionally, the effects hold for different elections and become more substantial over time. The results show that regressive citizenship regimes like Germany’s have negative, unintended consequences for a particular subset of their citizens: those who share the immigrant-origin background. These negative externalities raise normative questions about the foundational non-discriminatory ideals of democratic, immigration societies.

Author

• Julius Lagodny