Abstract
This paper examines institutional arrangements, which grant municipal voting rights to non-citizen residents of multicultural democracies and considers whether such arrangements are normatively compelling and practically useful as a way to achieve the multiculturalist aim of integration. Local voting rights have been granted to non-citizens in part as a strategy to integrate immigrants into mainstream democratic political life and thereby to avoid the radicalism that is sometimes the product of political exclusion and isolation. The author argues that the adoption of such arrangements in Canada and other multicultural democracies might not only provide newcomers with better opportunities to participate in decision-making processes that affect their interests – thus satisfying a democratic commitment to legitimacy – but that formal political participation by non-citizen residents might also encourage the development of the deliberative capacities and democratic commitments of those potential citizens. Indeed, the arrangements offer a democratic citizen apprenticeship that pursues a gradual integration of newcomers while being responsive to their claims and interests. The paper identifies and discusses certain barriers to non-citizen participation – including the comparatively lower socioeconomic status of newcomers and the lack of official language mastery – but it argues that inclusive, albeit unconventional, participatory arrangements may offer the best hope we have to overcome those circumstances and avoid newcomers’ slide into political cynicism.
Résumé
Cet article porte sur les arrangements institutionnels dans les démocraties multiculturelles qui donnent aux résidents non-citoyens le droit de vote municipal, et examine si ces arrangements représentent un impératif à tendance normative et une façon pratique et utile d’atteindre le but multiculturel qui est l’intégration. Le droit de vote local a été accordé aux non-citoyens en partie comme stratégie visant l’intégration des immigrants dans la vie politique et démocratique régulière, évitant ainsi le radicalisme qui est parfois le résultat de l’exclusion politique et l’isolement. L’auteur maintient que l’adoption de ce genre d’arrangements au Canada et dans d’autres démocraties multiculturelles offre aux nouveaux arrivants de meilleures occasions pour participer aux processus de prise de décisions qui les affectent, satisfaisant ainsi un critère démocratique de la légitimité. De plus, la participation politique formelle par des résidents non-citoyens pourrait stimuler le développement des capacités délibératives et de l’engagement démocratique chez ces citoyens potentiels. Effectivement, les arrangements proposent un apprentissage démocratique à la citoyenneté comme cheminement vers l’intégration graduelle des nouveaux arrivants, tout en respectant leurs revendications et leurs intérêts. Cet article identifie et discute certaines barrières à la participation de la part de non-citoyens, y compris le statut socioéconomique relativement faible et le manque de maîtrise des langues officielles chez les nouveaux arrivants. L’auteur conclut que des arrangements participatifs et inclusifs, quoique peu conventionnels, pourraient constituer la meilleure stratégie pour surmonter ces barrières et éviter que les nouveaux arrivants sombrent dans le cynisme politique. Mots clés: droit de vote aux résidents non-citoyens, légitimité démocratique, intégration, capacités délibératives, participation
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Notes
Advocates of non-citizen voting in the United States regularly point out that the first US soldier to die in the most recent Iraq war was not, in fact, an American citizen, but instead a Guatemalan immigrant who was not yet a US citizen and who, therefore, had no right to vote and have a say in where and when America’s military would be sent (Hayduk 2006: 64).
Schumpeter (1976). This is not to say that marginalization ends when a group gains the right to vote. Rather, it is simply to say that the costs of marginalization to candidates and elected officials increase when those who were formally excluded are included in the formal political process.
It has been suggested to me by Will Kymlicka, Ravi Pendakur, and an anonymous reviewer that perhaps the argument for extending voting rights to non-citizens would apply more to European countries than it would to Canada because the former require much longer durations of residence to qualify for citizenship than does the latter. The three-year gap between arrival in Canada and eligibility for citizenship does not seem to entail an especially significant democratic deficit when compared with a five-, 10-, or even 15-year waiting periods in some European countries. While I agree that the argument likely has more currency in Europe than it does in Canada, it is not the case that it has no relevance at all to Canada. The three-year minimum waiting period still entails a democratic deficit and, moreover, there are many individual cases in which the waiting period extends beyond three years. In either case, it would be a mistake to read this paper as offering a case for non-citizen resident voting in Canada alone.
I have relied on Seyla Benhabib’s English translation of the German Court’s decision. See Benhabib, 2004.
An anonymous reviewer has suggested that perhaps radical measures would be both more effective and more democratic. I agree that radical measures may be more effective. Whether they are more democratic is a question that requires further thinking. In both cases, however, I think the most prudent strategy for democratic integration is to explore how conventional rights and processes of participation might be reformed to assist newcomers in having their concerns addressed before we consider the more radical alternatives.
See the contributions in Fung & Wright (2003).
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Acknowledgement
Thanks to Loren King, Will Kymlicka, and Mark Warren for helpful comments and discussions. I also thank Queen’s University and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research whose generous funding allowed me to complete this project.
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Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the Culture and Trade Conference at the University of Windsor (2006), the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association at York University (2006), and at l’Université d’Ottawa (2007).
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Munro, D. Integration Through Participation: Non-Citizen Resident Voting Rights in an Era of Globalization. Int. Migration & Integration 9, 63–80 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-008-0047-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-008-0047-y