Migrant Electoral Rights (MER) New Data from 165 Countries and Six Decades
Abstract
Suffrage is a central element of democracy. Over time, electoral rights have increasingly become available to migrants—both as non-citizen residents (NCs) and as non-resident citizens (NRs). However, existing datasets either focus on only one of those categories, exclude candidacy rights, or have limited temporal and geographic scope. This article introduces the GLOBALCIT Dataset of Migrant Electoral Rights (MER), the most comprehensive dataset on migrant suffrage to date. MER covers voting and candidacy rights for both NCs and NRs. The coding differentiates between different types (legislative, executive, referendum) and levels (local, regional, national) of elections, as well as a range of eligibility, access, and modality conditions attached to these rights. Overall, the dataset contains up to 488 indicators across 165 countries from 1960 to 2020. By offering unparalleled data coverage and transparent documentation, MER facilitates the study of global trends in the political inclusion and exclusion of migrants, thus contributing to comparative political science, migration studies, and electoral policy analysis.
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