Citizenship beyond Nationality: Immigrant Voting Rights across the World

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This session brings together contributors to reflect on the research agenda of comparative immigrant citizenship and political integration policies with special focus on the extension of voting rights to resident immigrants, in critical dialogue with the book Citizenship beyond Nationality: Immigrant Voting Rights across the World, by Luicy Pedroza (U Penn Press, 2019). The main topic of this book is immigrants who have settled in democracies and who live indistinguishably from citizens—working, paying taxes, making social contributions, and attending schools—yet lack the status, gained either through birthright or naturalization, that would give them full electoral rights. Referring to this population as denizens, Pedroza asks what happens to the idea of democracy when a substantial part of the resident population is unable to vote, and further aims to understand how societies justify giving or denying electoral rights to denizens.

To investigate this question, Pedroza undertakes a comparative examination of the processes by which denizen enfranchisement reforms occur in democracies around the world in order to understand why and in what ways they differ. The first part of the book surveys a wide variety of reforms, demonstrating that they occur across polities that have diverse naturalization rules and proportions of denizens. The second part explores denizen enfranchisement reforms as a matter of politics, focusing on the ways in which proposals for reform were introduced, debated, decided, and reintroduced in two important cases: Germany and Portugal. Further comparing Germany and Portugal to long familiar cases, she reveals how denizen enfranchisement processes come to have a limited scope, or to even fail, and yet reignite. In the final part, Pedroza connects her theoretical and empirical arguments to larger debates on citizenship and migration. Citizenship beyond Nationality argues that the success and type of denizen enfranchisement reforms rely on how the matter is debated on by key political actors and demonstrates that, when framed in ambitious and inclusive terms, these deliberations have the potential to redefine democratic citizenship not only as a status but as a matter of politics and policy.
In the session, the panellists will bring expertise from different backgrounds and engage with the questions addressed in the book and the larger research agenda in which it is inserted. If political membership is but one aspect of citizenship, to what extent can we say that nationality has been overcome by reforms that enfranchised non-naturalized immigrants? What is the take of alternative theories of citizenship (e.g. citizenship as practice, critical citizenship studies) on this phenomenon? How far have voting rights helped to erase or redraw the dividing lines between “us” and “them” set by nationality laws and regulations? How far can the debates on denizen enfranchisement reconstitute “stories of peoplehood” (as defined by Rogers Smith) in different polities? If it is true that citizenship rights are increasingly won beyond the boundaries of nationality by virtue of more democratic criteria like residence, what can be said we say about the moral accounting of immigration policies, which imply that immigrants face decidedly unequal access to both entry and residence? These questions will serve as the springboard for brainstorming promising directions in the field of comparative citizenship studies.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 52: Migration and Citizenship

Chair

• Elizabeth F. Cohen Syracuse University

Presenters

• Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos University of Toronto

• Ron Hayduk San Francisco State Unversity

• Patti Tamara Lenard University of Ottawa

• Luicy Pedroza GIGA