Stakeholder Citizenship and Transnational Political Participation. A Normative Evaluation of External Voting

A forthcoming study lists nearly 100 countries and territories, i.e., more than half of all members of the United Nations and a clear majority of democratic states, whose laws permit citizens living abroad to participate in elections.1 This is a major new development of electoral rights. It reflects a profound change in conceptions of citizenship that has not been sufficiently examined from comparative and theoretical perspectives. How should we conceive of the demos in societies whose membership stretches across international borders? A focus on external voting rights seems to be particularly relevant for addressing this question. First, political participation and representation rights are the core of republican conceptions of citizenship, under which a citizen is a full member of a self-governing political community. Voting rights have generally remained attached to formal citizenship status, whereas most civil and social rights have been gradually extended to all residents independent of their nationality. It is, however, important to emphasize that this is no longer universally true, since many countries nowadays allow noncitizen residents to vote in local elections, and some even grant them electoral