The support for (de-)democratising voting-rights reforms among pro-democratic Europeans

Organised by

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• GGP: Global Governance Programme
• GlobalCit: Global Citzenship Observatory

The prevailing trend of treating voting-rights as a privilege for citizens has been challenged by a lively debate among democratic theorists. Growing numbers of resident non-citizens and non-resident citizens are likely to make voting-rights regulations more politically salient. Yet, these issues are largely missing in studies of public opinion and little is known about the support for the citizenship-principle and its more or less democratic alternatives. Informed by normative democratic theory, this article adds to this research field by conducting a comprehensive study of attitudes toward competing requirements for voting-rights, using a conjoint experiment on nationally representative samples of citizens of five European countries. The results indicate that considerable proportions of respondents support the residency-requirement defended by most democratic theorists. However, an equally large (or larger) proportion of the respondents supports a democratically dubious economic contribution-requirement, restricting voting-rights to taxpayers only. The support for this de-democratising voting-rights reform is unexpectedly strong also among respondents that indicates a general support for democracy measured by conventional measure of pro-democratic attitudes.