Transnational Citizenship and Access to Electoral Rights : Defining the Demos in European States

Who should have the right to vote – and who does? This chapter focuses on these two central questions, and combines discussion of the normative principles of the demos with a comprehensive mapping of the electoral rights in national elections of citizens and resident non-citizens in all 28 states of the European Union. We consider five possible constructions of the demos, examine the extent to which these principles are followed or observable in practice, and examine the correlation between the inner and outer boundaries implied by the models and the empirical reality of voting rules in Europe. When we compare these normative models with the empirical reality of national electoral regimes, the main distinctions in constructing the European demos revolve around citizenship and residence. From a normative perspective of democracy and justice, citizenship and residence alone are not adequate criteria for constituting the decision-making basis of a country’s electorate, but in practice it is generally these criteria that determine inclusion or exclusion of potential voters, rather than affectedness, subjection or contribution; even the stakeholder model is reflected to only a limited extent in the definition of the demos