Klaudia Wegschaider
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wegschaider.bsky.social
Klaudia Wegschaider
@wegschaider.bsky.social
1.9K followers 880 following 100 posts
Postdoc at UVienna and Yale ISPS || DPhil in Politics at Oxford DPIR || migration & suffrage & parties & mixed methods || klaudiawegschaider.com
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wegschaider.bsky.social
🚨 New Working Paper with R.Bauböck + @sumpierrez.bsky.social

We introduce the concept of incongruent suffrage.

This describes when there are voting rights but no candidacy rights for a group. Or vice versa.

The paper includes descriptive data & exploratory case studies.

doi.org/10.33774/aps...
Title: Incongruent Suffrage Authors: Klaudia Wegschaider, Rainer Bauböck, Sebastián Umpierrez de Reguero Abstract: Candidacy rights and voting rights are not always congruent. Although voting rights are extensively studied, historical and contemporary incongruencies in suffrage have been widely overlooked. We propose a typology of suffrage incongruency that we apply to the enfranchisement of non-citizen residents and non-resident citizens—two categories recently at the center of enfranchisement scholarship and reform efforts. Using an original dataset that covers 165 countries and 61 years (1960-2020), we identify past and present voting-only incongruencies and candidacy-only incongruencies. Existing theories of suffrage extension focus on the voteshare maximizing logic of incumbents. However, these explanations cannot account for why only one part of suffrage is extended. With two exploratory case studies of Switzerland and the United Kingdom, we inductively arrive at potential explanations for why voting-only and candidacy-only incongruencies arise and resolve in democracies. We conclude with a research agenda on the causes and consequences of suffrage incongruencies.
October 10, 2025 at 9:30 AM
wegschaider.bsky.social
Our typology is based on combinations of voting rights in the country of citizenship (CC) + residence (CR).

It considers local + national rights in the CR and national rights in the CC.

The most inclusive constellation contains all the above voting rights. The least inclusive type has none.
This table shows the six types of franchise constellations, combining the voting rights available in the country of citizenship (CC) and country of residence (CR). 6. full migrant franchise: national and local in CR, national in CC 5. local + external franchise: local in CR, national in CC 4. full domestic franchise: national and local in CR 3. external-only franchise: national in CC 2. local-only franchise: local in CR 1. no franchise: no rights in either CR or CC
September 9, 2025 at 10:29 PM
wegschaider.bsky.social
➡️📍📑 New Working Paper
with @sumpierrez.bsky.social and Rainer Bauböck

Work on migrant voting rights often has a state-centric perspective. We propose *migrant franchise constellations* as a migrant-centric approach.

A 🧵 with our argument and new data! 🗳️

preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/...
The expansion of voting rights beyond territory and citizenship marks a major democratic development of the last fifty years. Migrant suffrage has been mostly studied from a state-centric perspective. But the rights that migrants hold emerge from specific combinations of the country of residence and the country of citizenship. From this migrant-centric perspective, what is the diagnosis of the spread and status of global migrant suffrage? We present franchise constellations as a migrant-centric framework for studying voting rights. Drawing on the most comprehensive dataset on migrant electoral rights, combined with novel data on nationality-specific restrictions, we compute almost 1.3 million dyad-year observations based on 172 countries between 1960 and 2020. Using migrant stock data, we find that at least 74 million migrants remained completely disenfranchised in 2020. Bilateral and multilateral efforts emerge as a fruitful path for addressing global migrant disenfranchisement.
September 9, 2025 at 10:29 PM
wegschaider.bsky.social
Many people have kindly provided feedback on this paper, so here’s my block of thanks.
I am grateful to Christopher Wratil, Florian S. Schaffner, Alyssa Taylor, John Holbein, Noah Bacine, Giovanni Capoccia, Samuel Schmid, Lukas Stoetzer, Guillermo Kreiman, Raquel Chanto, Joanne Haddad, Moritz Marbach, Matias Lopez, Konstantinos Matakos, the anonymous reviewers, and the seminar participants at the University of Vienna, the European University Institute, the University of Oxford, Yale University, the EPSA Conference panel, the APSA Conference panel, the NCCR Graduate Conference panel, the EuroWEPS workshop, and the OX|BER workshop for their helpful feedback. This research would not have been possible without the generous funding by the Swiss nccr-on-the-move network, Pembroke College, the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, and the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford.
July 9, 2025 at 10:15 AM
wegschaider.bsky.social
📝🧵 New Publication ✨

My paper on multi-option referendums is now available open access in @cpsjournal.bsky.social

If you are interested in referendum design and/or immigrant enfranchisement and/or multi-method work, read on...
Abstract: Is voting behaviour in referendums impacted by having similar proposals on the same topic? Drawing on the literature on the compromise effect, I argue that support for a proposal is higher if it is presented alongside a more extreme version. Empirically, I apply this argument to the substantive topic of electoral rights for immigrants—a contemporary frontier of democratisation. First, I test the argument with an original survey experiment fielded in the United States. Second, I delve into the practical relevance of the topic by focusing on Swiss immigrant enfranchisement referendums. Two case studies complement a subsequent analysis of voting data. The results of the experiment and the observational analysis both support the idea that the compromise effect shapes voting behaviour in simultaneous referendums. These findings call on scholars to consider the compromise effect in the study of popular votes and political decision-making more generally.
July 9, 2025 at 10:13 AM
wegschaider.bsky.social
Here are two books that I’ve been reading this past week, putting US democracy in a long term perspective.
Picture of two books on a table. 1. The Decline and Rise of Democracy. A Global History from Antiquity to Today. By David Stasavage. 2. The Right to Vote. The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. By Alexander Keyssar.
January 20, 2025 at 5:13 PM