This project has received funding via the EUI Research Council call 2026.
Are democracies more inclusive than autocracies when it comes to deciding who is a citizen? While liberal norms impel democracies to open access to their political system, there are contrasting pressures. On the one hand, electoral pressures push democratic regimes towards more restrictive citizenship laws, while on the other, autocratic regimes selectively open toward co-ethnics abroad to expand their support base. We develop and test theoretical expectations in a National Science Foundation project that builds on a successful Research Council-funded proof-of-concept.
“Democracy” has many definitions, but foundational to most are competitive elections where citizens elect officeholders (Dahl 1973; Przeworski 1991). It is this participation that conveys democracy with legitimacy, and, therefore, the question of who gets to participate is critical to understanding democracy itself. Remarkably, the study of democratic inclusion has largely been confined to the question of “Who votes?”, with less scholarly attention to the question “Who is a citizen?”.
But assessing democratic inclusion and quality requires answering a prior question: Who gets to be a citizen in the first place? While there is a well-established literature on the comparative politics of citizenship policy (e.g., Vink 2016; Dzankic and Vink 2022; Goodman 2023b), there remain significant knowledge gaps on the role of political regime in shaping citizenship rules.
The project contributes high-impact, theoretically motivated research that advances knowledge about the relationship between democracy and citizenship inclusion that will help an interdisciplinary academic community – from legal scholars to sociologists and political scientists – understand a key political institution for the assignment of membership and adjudication of rights.