Ludvig Beckman

Citizenship and Voting Rights: Should Resident Aliens Vote?

The disenfranchisement of non-citizens in democratic governments is close to universal. In this article this state of affairs is critically examined from the vantage point of the meaning of the democratic criterion of inclusion. The major difficulty for any such endeavour is the apparent vagueness and ambiguity of that criterion. Two distinct interpretations are distinguished, the principle of membership and the all affected principle. The argument is made that only the all affected principle provides a coherent account of who should be included in the demos. More importantly, the observation is made that on any reasonable interpretation of the “all affected” the right to vote in national elections for resident aliens follows. Thus, the current practice of exclusion is found to be fundamentally at odds with the basic understanding of the democratic idea.

The Frontiers of Democracy

Democratization is a complex process that entails critical choices of new legislative and institutional frameworks, but that should also trigger citizens’ engagement and a change in mentality that reflects their attachment to the new system. Embedding democratic values in a pre-existing belief system marred by features of mistrust, fear and corruption created by totalitarian communist regimes and the hardships of transition is a difficult task that can hardly be achieved solely through institutional crafting. To promote active citizenship, transparency, accountability, tolerance and equality in a transforming society, a wider toolkit is necessary: the role of political socialization and civic education including through civic initiatives are essential, while the supporting potential of free media cannot be underestimated. Visegrad countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) have long portrayed themselves as “democracy’s new champions”, who, thanks to their own transition, have a unique set of experience that can support the transition of countries on a similar path, like Moldova.

Democracy and Inclusion

The success of the struggle for inclusive suffrage depends not only on the ability to mobilise support but also on the cogency of the theory underlying the claim that exclusions from suffrage are either unjust, undemocratic, or both. In one important respect the notion that democracy requires inclusion has achieved almost universal acceptance, most visibly in the notion that distinctions based on ethnicity, class, sex or race are illegitimate. In contrast, it appears less clear that democracy is compromised by suffrage restrictions based on age, criminal record, mental sanity and citizenship status. Do exclusions of that kind make the political community less democratic?

Do global climate change and the interest of future generations have implications for democracy

The inability of democratic governments to launch effective policies tackling global climate change has triggered criticism of democratic institutions and calls for increasing representation of future generations. In this article it is argued that introducing constraints on democratic institutions may sometimes conflict with the democratic interests of the generations to come. The potential conflict between environmental and political interests is further analysed using a contractualist framework. Contrary to what some contractualists have previously argued, it remains an open question to what extent we could reasonably expect future people to accept some constraints on the democratic process in return for more effective environmental policies.

Irregular Migration and Democracy: The Case for Inclusion

This article examines the democratic status of irregular immigrants from the vantage point of different models of democratic inclusion. The argument developed is that irregular immigrants are in fact members of the democratic state by virtue of being subjected to the legally binding norms in the territory of the state. The extension of the vote and other political rights to irregular immigrants nevertheless remains problematic due to their ‘illegal’ status. Because this status follows from the restrictive border policies implemented by most contemporary states, it shows that the ideal of democratic inclusion is scarcely reconcilable with a policy of restrictive cross-border movement. The conclusion defended in the article is that the interest in keeping borders restricted reduces the prospects for democratic inclusion in contemporary states.

Perspectives on justice, democracy and global climate change

Anthropogenic climate change, understood as the ongoing and complex pattern of changes in the composition of the earth’s atmosphere arising from human activity, has in recent years prompted a re-thinking of the scope and content of justice. A consensus is emerging that a theory of obligation is required that takes seriously the special features, and global reach, of climate change (Singer 2002, pp. 14–50, Page 2006, Roberts 2007, Vanderheiden 2008). Such a theory will involve a significant temporal and spatial aspect to reflect the fact that climate change will have far-reaching, and potentially catastrophic, implications for the well-being of non-compatriots and noncontemporaries. At present, the precise nature of our climate-related obligations, as well as the public and environmental policies these obligations entail, remains unclear, as do the implications of climate change for our current understanding of democracy and the institutional orders with which it is associated. One explanation for this unclarity is that genuine attempts to link philosophically robust accounts of democracy and justice on the one hand, and concrete questions of policymaking and democratic deliberation on the other, have only recently been forthcoming. In this edition of the journal, nine authors from a cross-section of social science disciplines seek to fill this gap by contributing articles on the scope and democratic implications of, and conflicts between, obligations generated by anthropogenic climate change. The articles that follow are usefully located in the context of four dimensions of ‘climate justice’, defined here as the study of the special problems of obligation and participation posed by climate impacts and policies for their management. The themes are: (1) the scope and content of climate justice; (2) global and intergenerational democracy; (3) poverty and posterity; and (4) science and society.

Democratic Inclusion, Law, and Causes

In this article two conceptions of what it means to say that all affected persons should be granted the right to vote in democratic elections are distinguished and evaluated. It is argued that understanding affected in legal terms, as referring to the circle of people bound by political decisions, has many advantages compared to the view referring to everyone affected in mere causal terms. The importance of jurisdictions in deciding rights to democratic influence should hence be recognized more clearly than it currently is in democratic thinking.

Democracy and Future Generations: Should the Unborn Have a Voice?

This article examines the view that the interests of future generations should be taken into consideration in decisions likely to affect them. In particular, it has been argued that the interests of future generations should be represented in local, national or international political decisions. This view is analyzed in terms of justice-seeking and democracy-seeking arguments and the extent to which the representation of future generations will promote the respective values of justice and democracy. In order to promote democracy, such representation must be consistent with the criterion of democratic inclusion. Assuming that democratic inclusion is conceptualized in legal terms, the representation of future generations is consistent with democracy only to the extent that they are likely to be bound by the decisions made today. It is shown here that future generations are not bound by the decisions made today. Thus, it follows that representing the interests of future generations in political decisions is not consistent with securing democracy for the living generation. The intergenerational problem is therefore one where the demands of justice and democracy may conflict.

Is Residence Special? Democracy in the Age of Migration and Human Mobility

Each year millions of people enter a foreign country as a temporary worker, asylum seeker, international student or unauthorised migrant in search for safety or new opportunities. As the number of people ‘on the move’ is growing, we need to reconsider prevailing assumptions about the democratic people as a collective at once subject to rule and entitled to participate in ruling.1 While the number of people subject to the laws of foreign nations grows larger, the number of people relegated to the status of mere subjects expands. These subjects are forced to pay taxes, forced to comply with a variety of laws and regulations, and are fined or imprisoned whenever they fail to abide to existing legal rules. If democracy entails that the people subject to rule should also have the right to participate in ruling, it is time to ask whether democracies as they are and democracy as it should be hold pace with current trends of transnational mobility?

Political equality and the disenfranchisement of people with intellectual impairments

In most democratic countries people with intellectual impairments are denied the right to vote in national elections. One important reason for this is that they are perceived as incapable of making independent political judgements and may thus fail to vote on the basis of their own preferences. Their exclusion is consequently defended by appeal to the need to protect the ‘integrity’ of democratic elections. In this article, this assertion is critically examined. The conclusion is that this argument does not hold sway once the connections between political equality and democratic elections have been clarified. Whilst political equality requires that elections are fair in the sense that everyone’s preferences are given equal weight, fundamentally political equality also requires that everyone’s opportunity to vote securely and without undue interference from others is recognised. Hence, as long as such opportunities have not been granted to people with intellectual impairments, they cannot consistently be excluded by appeal to the values of political equality.