Social partnership and 'foreigners policy': on special features of Austria's guest-worker system

Abstract. In most Western European countries, market forces have dominated the specific institutional regulations and administrative procedures concerned with labour migration and employment of foreigners during both the period of recruitment until 1973, and the subsequent period of massive reduction. But politics obviously does matter, especially in the area of foreigners policy. Internationally, Austria represents the corporatist case, and it is interesting to analyse which aspects of its foreigners policy can be ascribed to elements of the political system. One of the most conspicuous is that the 'foreigners problem' has not been in the forefront of political discourse. A second feature is that the trade unions, which have strongly influenced decisions concerning employment and the legal status of foreign workers, have made little effort to represent the specific interests of their foreign members. In Austria, as in other countries of immigration, former guest-workers have been permanent residents for many years, but the relevant legislation has been virtually unchanged since 1975 and is still based on a guest-worker system. However, increasing unemployment and significant changes in the party system could result in foreigners policy playing a more important political role in the near future.     

A multilevel puzzle: Migrants’ voting rights in national and local elections

How does international migration impact the composition of the demos? Constitutional doctrines and democratic theories suggest contrasting responses: an insular one excludes both non‐citizen immigrants and citizen‐emigrants; a deterritorialised one includes all citizens wherever they reside; a postnational one includes all residents and only these. This article argues that none of these predicted responses represents the dominant pattern of democratic adaptation, which is instead a level‐specific expansion of the national franchise to include non‐resident citizens and of the local franchise to include non‐citizen residents. This is demonstrated by analysing an original dataset on voting rights in 31 European and 22 American countries, and outlining a level‐sensitive normative theory of citizenship that provides support for this pattern as well as a critical benchmark for current franchise policies. The findings can be summarised in two inductive generalisations: (1) Voting rights today no longer depend on residence at the national level and on citizenship of the respective state at the local level; (2) Voting rights do, however, generally depend on citizenship of the respective state at the national level and on residence at the local level. In the article, these are called the patterns of franchise ‘expansion’ and ‘containment’. The former supports the idea of widespread level‐specific expansion of the franchise and refutes the insular view of the demos. The latter signals corresponding level‐specific restrictions, which defeats over‐generalised versions of deterritorialised or postnational conceptions of the demos. In order to test how robust this finding is, cases are analysed where the dominant patterns of expansion have been resisted and where unexpected expansion has occurred. With regard to the former, the article identifies constitutional and political obstacles to voting rights expansion in particular countries. With regard to the latter, the article shows that even where national voting rights have been extended to non‐citizen residents, containment remains strong through indirect links to citizenship.