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Inclusion and Public Policy: Evidence from Sweden’s Introduction of Noncitizen Suffrage
Author(s) -
Vernby Kåre
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2012.00612.x
Subject(s) - suffrage , immigration , residence , citizenship , political science , inclusion (mineral) , politics , competition (biology) , demographic economics , law , sociology , economics , social science , ecology , biology
The largest disenfranchised group in modern democracies is international migrants who lack citizenship of their country of residence. Despite that noncitizen suffrage has been introduced in some countries and has been the subject of vigorous public debate in many others, there have been no systematic attempts to investigate its policy consequences. Drawing on standard models of political competition, I argue that there will be a selection bias inherent in estimating the impact of noncitizen suffrage on public policy and analyze data that are uniquely suitable to deal with this methodological problem, namely data on exogenous changes in the composition of the electorates of Swedish municipalities generated by the introduction of noncitizen suffrage. According to the results, the effect of enfranchising noncitizens on public policy was large, causing spending on education and social and family services to increase substantially in municipalities where noncitizens made up a nonnegligible share of the electorate.