Abstract
We examine how different formal citizenship regimes fare in achieving the political inclusion of immigrants and their children by looking at voting turnout in local elections. We analyse survey data from four European cities that grant voting rights to foreigners but are located in countries with contrasting rules for access to formal citizenship. Local voting gaps are larger where citizenship rules are more restrictive, which suggests that citizenship regimes have long-lasting effects on political inclusion.
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Notes
Other forms of political inclusion – like attitudes and behaviours – are analysed in Morales and Giugni (2011).
Results presented in this article stem from integrated data sets produced by the project ‘Multicultural Democracy and Immigrants’ Social Capital in Europe: Participation, Organisational Networks and Public Policies at the Local Level (LOCALMULTIDEM)’. This project was funded by the European Commission under the sixth Framework Programme's Priority 7 ‘Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge-Based Society’ as a STREP instrument (contract no. CIT5-CT-2005-028802). In addition, the Swedish and Norwegian data were collected with funding from the Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research, and the Research Council of Norway, respectively. The data for Geneva were collected with funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 100012–109429). The authors want to acknowledge the work of the following colleagues in the production of the original data sets: Marco Giugni, Mario Diani, Paul Statham, Manlio Cinalli, Endre Sik, Bo Bengtsson and Jon Rogstad.
The surveys were conducted in person in London, Oslo and Stockholm, and by phone in Geneva due to the high cost of face-to-face surveys in Switzerland. See Morales and Giugni (2011) for more details on the characteristics of the samples. In our samples, there are no relevant differences between the autochthonous population and the first generations of immigrants in terms of their age profile, but second generations and children of mixed marriages tend to be much younger – especially in Oslo and Stockholm, where more than 50 per cent are less than 36 years old. All groups are much more balanced in terms of gender, although first generations in London and second generations in Oslo are predominantly male – both at 61 per cent.
The more restrictive requirements in Geneva – 8 years of residence – means that 55 per cent of the migrant-background individuals interviewed in that city were not eligible to vote in local elections, as they reported in response to our questionnaire; thus, they are excluded from our analyses. The equivalent figure was 11 per cent for Oslo, 8 per cent for London and 7 per cent for Stockholm, reflecting less demanding rules for eligibility. Hence, the immigrant-background electorate in Geneva is more ‘selective’ – at least in terms of length of residence – and less representative of the overall immigrant-background population in that city than the respective electorates in the other cities studied.
The exact wording of the questions was: ‘Sometimes people don’t vote because they cannot or because they don’t want to. Did you vote in the last [name of host country parliament] elections, or was there anything that made you unable or unwilling to vote? (INT: If respondent answers no, ask if he/she was eligible to vote or not.) And did you vote in the last local elections? (INT: If respondent answers no, ask if he/she was eligible to vote or not.)’
Of course, the fact that we focus on the citizen/foreigner distinction does not mean that the national origin of the immigrant groups is irrelevant. However, our analyses (not shown) indicate that these gaps hold for most migrant groups studied across cities.
We run four separate logistic regression models, one per each city, with the same control variables: citizenship of the country of residence, age (also in quadratic form), gender, educational level, employment status, whether in a relationship (married or with partner) or not, spouse/partner is autochthonous, more than half of respondent's life spent in the host country, and fluent in country/city language. The model also included a dummy for the children of mixed couples, but given the lack of precision in the estimations due to sample sizes we have left this group out of the graph. The probabilities in Figure 1 have been calculated for a hypothetical 40-year-old male respondent who is employed, with an educational level equal to the mean educational level in his city of residence, living with a non-autochthonous partner, who has lived in the country for more than half of his life and is fluent in the country/city language.
Not shown here but available on request.
The shares of the non-fluent eligible respondents are 13 per cent in Geneva, 12 in Oslo, 9 in London and 7 in Stockholm.
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gonzález-ferrer, a., morales, l. Do Citizenship Regimes Shape Political Incorporation? Evidence from Four European Cities. Eur Polit Sci 12, 455–466 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2013.15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2013.15