The Democratic Limits of Membership Control
Imagine a city where thousands of foreign residents work, raise families, and depend on the same public institutions as citizens. Some have lived there for decades, yet cannot vote in the elections shaping their community.
The city council proposes extending voting rights. Who should decide whether these residents can vote?
This is not just a hypothetical question. In December 2021, the New York City Council voted to allow certain noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents and people authorized to work in the United States, to vote in municipal elections. The measure became law in January 2022. But on March 20, 2025, New York’s highest court held that the state constitution restricted voting to citizens and invalidated the law.
The measure required only 30 consecutive days of city residence, alongside other conditions. It was not a test of whether durable residence should lead to full political membership. Nor would local voting rights alone have conferred full national membership.
Its importance is different: the City Council wanted to expand participation, but the state constitution, as interpreted by the courts, limited the city’s authority. The city could not decide the matter alone.
Who should have the authority to determine who belongs to a democratic electorate?
Two dimensions of political freedom meet here. Hand Democracy means collective democratic self-government. Foot Democracy means meaningful political-community choice, including opportunities to leave, enter, remain, and seek membership. Both matter. But what happens when existing members’ authority conflicts with the claims of people seeking to join them?
Membership Rules Are Different
The previous essay asked who should count as “the people” in a democracy. Resident Sovereignty offers one answer: durable residence, rather than inherited nationality, should be the primary basis of ordinary political membership.
This essay asks a different question. Who sets the conditions through which residence leads to membership?
Legislatures make rules, administrators apply them, and courts may review them. Constitutions can constrain all three. The New York case demonstrates that these institutions need not agree.
Membership decisions are unusual because they determine who will take part in future decisions. A vote on school funding allocates public money. A vote on voting rights helps determine who can influence the next decision about schools, housing, or taxes.
Existing voters are partly deciding how widely to share their own political power. That does not make their decisions automatically illegitimate. It does mean that a majority vote alone cannot settle the question of legitimacy.
Nor should legal authority be confused with democratic justification. The New York court interpreted the allocation of authority under a state constitution. The deeper question—whether the rules properly include people durably governed by a community—requires an argument about political equality as well as an answer about which institution has legal power.
Why Collective Self-Government Matters
Sarah Song offers a serious defense of collective self-determination in Immigration and Democracy (2018). Her argument supports a qualified, not unlimited, right of democratic states to regulate immigration.
A political community maintains schools, infrastructure, public services, and institutions that require cooperation over time. Rapid population growth can sometimes strain these institutions, although such claims require evidence rather than assumption. A government must be able to consider capacity and available alternatives.
The World Citizen framework recognizes this concern. Foot Democracy cannot mean that every individual preference automatically overrides the institutional needs of an existing community. A serious defense of political-community choice must ask not only what a prospective resident wants but also what duties political institutions owe to residents already relying on their schools, housing systems, and public services. Those obligations must be assessed openly, without allowing vague fears to substitute for evidence.
But Song also takes the position of outsiders and residents seriously. In Chapter 10, she argues that longer residence strengthens claims to rights, including the right to remain. People who have made a place their home cannot indefinitely be treated as if they had just arrived.
Her 2012 essay on the democratic boundary problem also defends the territorial state as a setting for political equality, solidarity, and representation. That need not conflict with the World Citizen framework. Territorial government and inherited membership are different things. Even if we need territorial institutions, why must inherited nationality determine who can eventually join in governing them?
When Does Self-Government Become Exclusion?
Consider two decisions. A community temporarily adjusts admissions because of serious, documented limits in public infrastructure. Another declares that people born elsewhere can never become full political members, even after decades of lawful residence.
Both could attract majority support, but they are not equally justified. The first might respond to a legitimate institutional constraint, provided the restriction is supported by evidence and less restrictive options have been considered. The second makes inherited status a permanent political barrier.
Rights Before Choice supplies a necessary limit: neither majority rule nor individual mobility can override basic rights.
There is also a difference between deciding whether someone may begin a relationship with a community and deciding the political future of someone who has already established one. The second decision demands stronger reasons for exclusion.
The problem is circular. Existing citizens possess political power because they are members. They can then use that power to decide who may become a member. Residents excluded from the electorate cannot vote against restrictions that perpetuate their exclusion. Those who benefit from the rules remain in control of changing them.
This does not mean every prospective newcomer should vote on every admission rule. A person who hopes to move to a country and someone who has lived there for twenty years do not have identical claims. The former needs fair opportunities for meaningful entry; the latter has already become subject to a continuing institutional order.
But current membership cannot, by itself, justify exclusive and permanent control over future membership. Some standard beyond the existing electorate’s preferences is needed. Otherwise, the absence of political rights becomes its own justification for never granting them.
Different Claims Require Different Answers
Rainer Bauböck’s work on democratic inclusion helps clarify why there is no single answer to every boundary question.
People affected by decisions have claims to consideration. People subject to political authority have claims to rights and opportunities to challenge it. Stakeholders—people whose lives and future are tied to a political community’s continued self-government—may have claims to citizenship.
Bauböck also distinguishes local, national, and supranational communities. The same membership rule need not govern each level. A settled resident’s claim to participate in local government, for example, is not identical to a nonresident citizen’s claim to national voting rights.
His stakeholder principle and Resident Sovereignty overlap but are not interchangeable. Bauböck emphasizes a person’s stake in a community’s continuing self-government and the different functions of political institutions. Resident Sovereignty identifies durable residence as the primary ordinary basis of political membership, while allowing other connections to matter.
The lesson is practical: different claims require institutions capable of weighing them. Existing citizens’ preferences cannot automatically settle them all.
This also helps explain why a system need not give everyone the same rights on their first day of residence. A newly arrived resident may be protected by basic rights without immediately holding the full range of political rights. What cannot be justified is a system with no meaningful progression toward membership for those who become durably resident.
What Can a Community Decide?
Communities may set conditions for admission and a pathway to membership. Their reasons, however, must be open to examination. Claims about overwhelmed services require evidence; restrictions should be proportionate, allow less restrictive alternatives where feasible, and remain open to revision.
A further principle applies to settled residents: sufficiently durable residence must create a meaningful route toward full political membership. This does not impose a universal number of years or make residence a new all-purpose legal status. It rejects indefinite exclusion merely because someone inherited a different nationality.
Hand Democracy therefore cannot justify an unlimited power to exclude. Foot Democracy does not require immediate and unconditional full membership wherever someone chooses. Their boundary must develop through institutional adjustment, within limits set by basic rights.
Once full membership is established, Membership Security adds a separate protection: holding another nationality must not, by itself, make a full political member removable under ordinary immigration-law rules.
Entry, eventual membership, and the security of full membership are distinct stages. They must not be governed by one unrestricted power of exclusion.
Who Should Make the Decision?
An elected legislature can establish general rules. Yet residents whose political future is at stake need meaningful opportunities to explain their claims and contest decisions. Courts or independent review bodies can check whether legal standards and rights have been respected. Mobility across communities may also require agreements among them.
Svenja Ahlhaus proposes a more unusual possibility: a boundary assembly, selected by lot and designed to represent members and nonmembers on an equal basis. Under her proposal, such an assembly could make binding decisions on a limited range of membership questions, rather than replacing the legislature as a whole.
The proposal does not solve every problem. The assembly would itself need rules governing selection, authority, and review. It would also need to explain how nonmembers are selected and which membership decisions fall within its jurisdiction. But it challenges the assumption that only existing voters may determine the electorate’s boundaries.
The World Citizen framework does not require every community to adopt this model. Legislative processes, meaningful consultation, independent review, and specially designed assemblies may play different roles. A community should also explain which institution decides the general rule and which hears an individual’s appeal. A public debate over residence requirements is different from reviewing a mistaken decision about one applicant’s residence record.
The relevant question is whether these institutions can recognize collective interests without leaving those excluded from membership permanently without recourse. A process is not fair merely because it invites comments. People need reasons they can examine and, where rights are at stake, procedures capable of correcting errors.
Democracy Must Justify Its Authority
Return to New York City. Its highest state court resolved a constitutional question about who had legal authority to expand municipal voting rights. It did not settle the philosophical question of who ought to hold that authority—or what limits should apply.
Existing members have legitimate claims to self-government. People who have built durable lives under the same institutions have legitimate claims too. Neither can simply cancel the other.
The power to govern a political community cannot become an unlimited power to decide who may ever belong to it.
The point is not to deny democratic self-government. It is to ask how self-government can remain democratic when some of those durably governed have no meaningful route to joining the people who govern.
A democracy cannot avoid decisions about belonging. But those decisions must be justified to more than the people who already belong.
Further Reading
The World Citizen Society: Political Freedom, Democratic Choice, and the Institutions of a New Society — Chapter 4: “Resident Sovereignty, Resident Equality, and Membership Security.”
Related essays
- Who Should Count as the People in a Democracy?
- Hand Democracy and Foot Democracy: Two Dimensions of Political Freedom
- Why Exit Is Not Enough: The Missing Problem of Entry
- Rights Before Choice: Why Neither Majorities nor Mobility Can Override Basic Rights
Key Concepts — Hand Democracy; Foot Democracy; Resident Sovereignty.
References
- Sarah Song, Immigration and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Chapters 4 and 10.
- Sarah Song, “The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory: Why the Demos Should Be Bounded by the State,” International Theory 4, no. 1 (2012): 39–68.
- Rainer Bauböck, “Political Membership and Democratic Boundaries,” in The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, edited by Ayelet Shachar et al. (Oxford University Press, 2017), 60–82.
- Rainer Bauböck, Democratic Inclusion: Rainer Bauböck in Dialogue (Manchester University Press, 2017).
- Svenja Ahlhaus, “Boundary Assembly: An Institutional Proposal for Democratizing Membership Politics,” Global Constitutionalism 14, no. 3 (2025): 517–540. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2045381724000212.
- Fossella v. Adams, 44 N.Y.3d 258, 2025 NY Slip Op 01668 (N.Y. Court of Appeals, March 20, 2025). https://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/3dseries/2025/2025_01668.htm
