Inclusive Electoral Institutions and Efficacy of Ethnic Voters in Democracies

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

Abstract

Today, immigrants constitute a sizeable share of the population in many advanced democracies, making them an increasingly consequential part of the electorate. Yet, these citizens' political orientations have long gone understudied, leaving crucial knowledge gaps about what drives their political mobilization. Most leading explanations of minority voters' political under-mobilization focus on their socio-demographic factors, lower political socialization, and interest in host country politics. However, so far, there has been limited attention paid- outside of the North American context - to the local effects and institutional conditions that may influence political incorporation of ethnic minority voters.

Adding to the scarce research focusing on the local context, we investigate the link between political efficacy and inclusive electoral institutions. More specifically, we focus on the effect of alien enfranchisement on the efficacy dynamics for citizens with an immigration background as an obvious and strong marker of ethnic minority inclusiveness. Breaking with ongoing debates, we bring forward political efficacy as a critical concept when it comes to understanding the political behavior amongst minority voters. Addressing this omission of efficacy perceptions in the literature is particularly crucial if internal and external efficacy dynamics of these minority groups are mitigated by an external factor embedded in host societies. Yet, outside of the few valuable case study evidence, we know little about how the political attitudes of internal and external efficacy are shaped amongst ethnic voters. This research gap is particularly surprising because the idea of efficacy has been at the core of democratic representation studies and electoral politics.

Theoretically, we argue that more inclusive contexts positively shape the efficacy perceptions of ethnic voters in host democracies. Living in an electorally inclusive context which extends voting rights to all long-term residents relates to higher internal and external efficacy, arguably, through a logic of perceived equal treatment, acceptance, and responsiveness.

Empirically, first, we focus on the case of Switzerland and exploit the sub-national variation in local electoral institutions using longitudinal data from the Swiss Household Panel from 1999 to 2016, employing a difference-in-differences identification strategy. In this way, we can narrowly isolate the causal impact of alien enfranchisement reforms on political efficacy amongst ethnic minority voters. Next, we triangulate our evidence using cross-sectional data from the European Social Survey and the European/World Values Survey(s). We investigate whether the extent of efficacy differences between immigrant-origin and native citizens are predicted by electoral inclusiveness at the national level extending the arguments of our theory.

The paper contributes to ongoing debates in comparative politics and ethnic and racial studies by proposing a relatively little-acknowledged potential explanation for understanding the political underrepresentation of citizens with an immigration background in host societies. Next, we bring forward evidence addressing the political consequences of alien enfranchisement policies. Finally, we suggest that immigrants' political integration is not only a function of their economic, cultural, and social capital but may also be related to the contexts in which they are received in the host democracies.

Authors

• Elif Naz Kayran, Leiden University

• Anna-Lena Nadler