Temporary migration projects and voting rights

Theorists have recently argued that in order to protect migrants from vulnerability and domination, host countries should grant voting rights to all residents, including those who are present on the territory on a temporary visa. Although we endorse the inclusive and egalitarian rationale of this approach, we argue that it is based on the presumption that all migrants aim at permanent inclusion and is therefore inadequate in the case of those who are engaged in ‘temporary migration projects’. We suggest that in order to provide these migrants with a form of political voice that fits their life plans, we need to look at different institutional tools than conventional voting rights, and we point to trade unions and migrant organizations as promising alternatives. We also show that, contrary to what may be thought of other forms of temporary mobility, temporary migration projects and the institutional solutions we propose in order to address the needs of the migrants involved are not disruptive of liberal-democratic institutions.     

Democracy and noncitizen voting rights

The boundaries of democracy are typically defined by the boundaries of formal status citizenship. Such state-centered theories of democracy leave many migrants without a voice in political decision-making in the areas where they live and work, giving rise to a problem of democratic legitimacy. Drawing on two democratic principles of inclusion, the all affected interests and coercion principles, this article elaborates this problem and examines two responses offered by scholars of citizenship for what receiving states might do. The first approach involves expanding the circle of citizenship to include resident noncitizens. A second approach involves disaggregating the rights conventionally associated with citizenship from the legal status of citizenship and extending some of those rights, including voting rights, to resident noncitizens. This article argues that both approaches fall short of satisfying the democratic principles of inclusion, which call for enfranchising individuals not only beyond the boundaries of citizenship but also beyond territorial boundaries.     

Reaching for profit in the welfare state: Patrimonial economic voting in Denmark

Economic voting has been well-studied in a number of advanced industrial democracies, including Denmark. However, that work has been almost entirely on the valence dimension, i.e., rewarding or punishing government according to whether the overall economy prospers. Recent work has looked at other economic voting dimensions, including patrimony, i.e., the impact of property ownership on the vote. A patrimonial effect has been found in the UK, the US, and France. However, it seems to differ somewhat depending on the welfare-character of the state, with the US at one end and France at the other. Here we examine patrimonial economic voting in a still more extreme welfare state - Denmark. In our analysis of voting in the 2011 parliamentary election, we establish two new findings: 1. patrimonial economic voting exists in Denmark and, 2. its effect is stronger than that for other countries studied thus far.     

The Danish welfare state under bourgeois reign

From 1982 to 1993, a decade of tight economic constraints, the Danish welfare state was governed by bourgeois parties. The expectation of the power resources model, the most prevalent theory about the Scandinavian welfare states, was that the Danish welfare state would be turned further in a residual direction. Those expectations were, however, never fulfilled – on the contrary, the Danish welfare state was further expanded in a social democratic direction. A focus on how the bourgeois governments, often in a difficult parliamentary situation, tried to adapt the popular Danish welfare state to less favorable economic conditions accounts for important aspects of this development. The bourgeois governments relied on a combination of increased benefits to large groups of voters and well-hidden measures to strengthen public finances.     

The puzzle of Dutch welfare state retrenchment

In the literature on welfare state retrenchment and in the general emphasis on the resilience of welfare states, the Dutch case appears puzzling by virtue of the fact that significant retrenchments have actually taken place in the Netherlands. It appears even more puzzling considering that the arguments in this literature as to the difficulties in welfare state retrenchments apply very well to this case, whereas the arguments as to why after all welfare state retrenchments are possible do not apply particularly well. This article argues that the explanation for the Dutch puzzle should be found in Dutch politics. Due to the power of the CDA as a pivotal centre party, the PvdA was at an early stage forced to accept welfare state retrenchment. A party consensus thus emerged allowing Dutch governments to define the issue of welfare state retrenchment as a matter of economic necessity.     

Economic voting and welfare programmes: Evidence from the American states

While scholars have hypothesised that a strong welfare state should reduce voters' incentives to base their votes on economic outcomes, evidence for this proposition remains mixed. This article tests whether differences in welfare protections across American states affect the relationship between economic performance and support for the president's party in 430 state legislative elections from 1970 to 1989. Analysing the results of over 42,000 contests in which an incumbent was running for re‐election, it finds that while unemployment insurance programmes do not affect the importance of economic performance, the electoral fortunes of presidential co‐partisans are less strongly tied to the national economy in states with generous anti‐poverty programmes. Thus by reducing vulnerability to poverty, economic safety‐nets lower the salience of the economy and provide electoral cover for politicians during economic slowdowns.     

The globalized, generous welfare state: Possibility or oxymoron?

Abstract. Arguments about the incompatibility of globalization and generous welfare spending have given way to more nuanced analyses of how domestic-level institutions mediate the impact of globalization. This article discusses and compares two models – the labour-partisan politics model and the labour-monetary politics model – that identify national-level institutions that are said to make it possible for states to combine generous welfare spending and good economic performance. The empirical analysis shows that the labour-monetary politics model performs better for the period 1973–1989. However, institutional conditions that existed during these years are shown to be rather poor predictors of economic performance in the 1990s. The article goes on to discuss what this suggests for the continued viability of generous welfare spending and argues that while globalization might undermine some institutional settings conducive to continued generosity, there is evidence that other ones remain viable.     

Electoral competition and the welfare state

The article investigates how parties compete over the welfare state by emphasising specific welfare state issues. The core argument is that two issue-specific factors determine how much parties emphasise individual welfare state issues: the character of policy problems related to the policy issues and the type of social risks involved. To test the argument, a new large-N dataset is employed, with election manifestos from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The dataset contains information on how much parties have talked about health care, education, and labour market protection in national elections since 1980. With the data at hand, it is possible to provide the first systematic investigation of how parties compete for votes over the welfare state. The approach here is able to explain the empirical fact that health care is consistently receiving increased attention everywhere, while particularly labour market protection has witnessed a decline in attention.     

Democracy for all: restoring immigrant voting rights in the US

This paper examines the politics of noncitizen voting in the United States. It is not widely known that noncitizens currently vote in local elections in Maryland and in Chicago; nor that over the past decade campaigns to expand the franchise to noncitizens have been launched in at least a dozen other jurisdictions from coast to coast. These practices have their roots in another little known fact: for most of the country's history—from the founding until the 1920s—noncitizens voted in 22 states and federal territories in local, state and even federal elections, and also held public office such as alderman, coroner, and school board member. This paper presents arguments for (and against) noncitizen voting rights, and examines contemporary political organizations and actors who fought for and won (or lost) campaigns to reinstate noncitizen voting. The paper explores the politics of recent campaigns that successfully reestablished noncitizen voting, that are currently underway, and other campaigns that failed. The paper argues that an expansion of immigrant voting rights could boost possibilities for working‐class electoral coalitions and progressive politics.