Taxation with representation : understanding natives' attitudes to foreigners' voting rights

Abstract

This paper examines theoretically natives’ decision to grant political rights to foreign residents based on their contribution to a redistribution mechanism that finances a private and a public good. I propose a model where agents’ redistributive preferences are determined by their income and cultural beliefs about public spending, which vary across nationalities. I show that under some conditions, low-income natives can gain politically from enfranchising foreigners that are richer than natives on average as long as these foreigners have sufficiently liberal beliefs towards public spending. Moreover, I establish that natives’ support for foreigners’ enfranchisement is a non-monotonic function of these foreigners’ income and cultural beliefs. Rather, these variables influence attitudes towards enfranchisement based on foreigners’ relative taste for the private and the public good. I also provide empirical results in support of my theory using a municipality-level dataset of Swiss referenda about non-citizen voting rights.