Títle: The Redistributive Effects Of Enfranchising Non-Citizens: Evidence From Sweden
Room: E28
Time: 12:30
Abstract: We study the redistributive effects of extending voting rights to non-citizens. Our mechanism predicts that the effect of this reform will depend on the political power of the new voters. In particular, this power will be greater the more contested the previous elections in the municipality were. We use the 1975 Swedish electoral reform that extended voting rights to non-citizens in municipal elections as an illustration of our mechanism. We see that in the first legislature after the reform there was a substantial increase in taxes that was not repeated in subsequent legislatures. This increase was greater the greater the non-citizen population in the municipality. However, this effect only occurred in those municipalities where the fraction represented by the new voters was large enough to be able to alter the result of the previous elections.