David C. Earnest, Voting Rights for Resident Aliens -- 2
pursued innovative approaches to incorporate these resident aliens into
their polities. Sending states have expanded the use of the absentee
ballot, have created overseas legislative districts, and even
encouraged their émigrés to hold multiple citizenships simultaneously--
a significant reversal of past practice that runs counter to
established international law. Host states by contrasted have adopted
one of the more surprising and innovative practices to incorporate
resident aliens into the political life of their societies. Since 1960,
twenty-three democracies have created voting rights for resident
aliens, while several others have considered but rejected such rights
(Rath 1990, Earnest 2003). Taken together, these innovative practices
have led some political scientists to argue that states are separating
the institution of citizenship both from its territorial basis and from
the body of rights it traditionally has embodied. For this reason,
researchers have focused on the politics of citizenship as an approach
to broader questions of the historical evolution of state sovereignty,
citizenship, democratic norms, and the global human rights regime.
This paper seeks to contribute to the debate between what some
scholars have called the “nationalist” and “postnationalist” theses of
citizenship politics (see inter alia Koopmans and Statham 1999;
Aleinikoff 2000 and 2001; Galloway 2001; Gerstle and Mollenkopf 2001;
Kondo 2001; and Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer 2002). In brief, both theses
seek to explain the state’s practices for the constitution of its
political community, but each locates the causes of the state’s
policies at different levels of analysis. As the labels “nationalist”
and “postnationalist” suggest, furthermore, the two theses diverge on
the implications of contemporary citizenship politics in democracies
for our understanding of how global flows of migrants and norms may
affect the institution of sovereignty. Using voting rights for resident
Convention