Why durable residence offers a better ordinary boundary for political membership than inherited nationality
Imagine two people living on the same street.
Both have lived there for fifteen years. Their children attend the same schools. They pay taxes under the same laws and depend on the same courts, public services, and local government. Both are raising families and building their futures in the same community.
Yet only one can vote in national elections.
The first person was born with the country’s nationality. The second arrived from another country and has lived there legally for fifteen years.
The first is a full political member. The second may remain excluded from national democratic decisions.
Why?
The usual answer is citizenship. One person is a citizen; the other is not. But that describes the legal distinction without explaining why it is democratically justified.
It brings us to a question that democratic societies cannot avoid:
Who should count as "the people" in a democracy?
Democracy means government by the people. Yet before the people can govern, someone must decide who belongs among them.
Political theorists call this the democratic boundary problem: the problem of deciding who should be included in the group entitled to govern itself.
Resident Sovereignty offers one institutional answer:
Durable residence, rather than inherited nationality, should be the primary basis of ordinary political membership.
Why should residence have this priority? The answer begins with the problem of defining the democratic people.
The Democratic Boundary Problem
In 1983, political theorist Frederick G. Whelan examined a difficulty at the foundations of democratic theory in "Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem."
Democracy provides procedures for making collective decisions. People vote, elect representatives, debate policies, and hold governments accountable. But these procedures already assume that someone has determined who may participate.
Suppose a town is deciding whether long-term foreign residents should receive voting rights.
One answer is to let existing voters decide. But why should existing voters alone have the authority to determine whether excluded residents belong among the people entitled to vote?
Holding another vote does not resolve the difficulty. That vote, too, requires a decision about who may participate.
A democratic vote cannot, by itself, justify the boundary of the electorate when that boundary has already determined who is allowed to vote.
This is not merely a technical problem. It concerns the foundations of democratic authority.
Modern states usually define national electorates through citizenship or nationality, alongside qualifications such as age. This provides legal clarity and institutional continuity, but it leaves a deeper question unanswered:
Why should the circumstances of birth determine whether someone can eventually become a full member of the political community in which they live?
Being Affected Is Not Being a Member
One influential approach to this problem is called the all-affected principle: people whose interests are affected by political decisions should have a say in those decisions.
In his 2007 essay "Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives," Robert E. Goodin examines this principle and its implications for democracy.
The attraction is easy to understand. Political decisions do not stop having consequences at national borders. Environmental policies may harm people in neighboring countries. Trade policies may change employment opportunities abroad. Military decisions may transform the lives of people who have no voice in the country making them.
These people cannot simply be ignored.
Goodin’s analysis also shows how demanding the all-affected principle can become. Once everyone potentially affected by possible decisions is considered, the relevant public may extend far beyond any existing political community.
Should everyone affected by a political decision become a member of the political community making it?
I think we need to distinguish two questions: Who should have a voice because a decision affects their interests? And who should belong to the political community as an ordinary, continuing member?
Someone in Brazil may be deeply affected by American monetary policy. That person may have legitimate claims concerning international economic governance. But it does not necessarily follow that they should become an ordinary member of the American electorate.
Political effects may justify consultation, accountability, legal protection, or participation in particular institutions. They do not automatically establish ordinary membership in every political community producing those effects.
This does not diminish Goodin’s argument. It shows why democratic participation in decisions and continuing membership in a political community must be distinguished.
Why Being Governed Matters
A second approach is called the all-subjected principle. Rather than asking whose interests are affected by a decision, it asks who must live under binding political authority.
Robert A. Dahl’s Democracy and Its Critics (1989) provides an important contribution to this approach. Dahl connects democratic inclusion with adults subject to an association’s binding collective decisions, while recognizing exceptions such as people who are only temporarily present.
Consider a long-term resident without citizenship.
The government makes laws the resident must obey. Its courts resolve disputes involving that person. Its agencies regulate employment, housing, taxation, and ordinary economic activity. Public institutions shape education, health, safety, and other conditions of life.
The resident is not merely affected from a distance. The resident lives under this system of government.
If people must live under a political authority for many years, why should they remain indefinitely excluded from participating in its government?
Yet being subject to law does not provide a complete institutional rule. Tourists, temporary students, and seasonal workers must also obey local laws. Does that mean they should all become full political members immediately?
Not necessarily.
Resident Sovereignty takes the concern behind the all-subjected principle seriously, but does more than add a requirement of time. It identifies durable residence within a shared institutional order as the primary basis of ordinary political membership.
Why Durable Residence Matters
A tourist visiting for two weeks and a person who has lived in a community for twenty years are both subject to its laws. Their relationships with its institutions, however, are not the same.
Four considerations help explain the difference:
- Durable ordinary residence: The political community is the person’s established place of life, not a temporary destination.
- Persistent governance: Its laws and authorities continuously shape everyday life.
- Institutional dependence: The person relies on its courts, administration, infrastructure, and public institutions.
- Participation in common institutions: Through family, education, work, or other social ties, the person shares the life of the community.
These are not mechanical tests that everyone must satisfy identically. Retired people, children, and those unable to work may participate differently. Political membership must not become a reward for economic productivity.
What matters is an enduring relationship with the institutions that govern ordinary life.
Nor does the principle establish one universal waiting period. Three, five, or ten years cannot automatically be the correct threshold for every society. It gives a direction for institutional design, not a universal number.
Temporary presence and durable residence can legitimately be distinguished. But sufficiently durable residence must create a meaningful route toward full political membership. Without such a route, a society could govern settled residents indefinitely while denying them equal political membership.
Why Residence Should Have Priority
Why, then, should durable residence have priority over inherited nationality?
Ordinary political membership concerns participation in the institutions through which a political community governs itself. Those who live durably under these institutions have a strong democratic claim to help govern them.
Residence connects continued subjection to government, reliance on common institutions, and participation in a shared political order. Inherited nationality does not necessarily establish the same continuing relationship.
Someone may possess nationality without living under the country’s ordinary institutions. Someone else may live under those institutions for decades without possessing nationality.
If we want to identify the people who should ordinarily participate in governing a political community, durable residence has a stronger claim to priority.
This does not mean every existing nationality system is illegitimate. Nationality remains relevant to many legal and political relationships.
But when durable residence and inherited nationality point toward different people, democracy requires a reason for giving inherited nationality automatic priority. Historical practice alone is not enough.
Resident Sovereignty offers a starting point for defining the ordinary democratic people, not a claim to resolve every difficult case in advance.
Residents Without Citizenship, Citizens Without Residence
Consider someone who has lived in a country for decades without citizenship. Now consider a citizen who left that country many years ago and permanently settled elsewhere.
The first lives under the country’s ordinary institutions. The second retains nationality but may no longer share the same daily relationship with them. Which connection should carry greater democratic weight?
In his 2005 essay "Should Expatriates Vote?", Claudio López-Guerra questions the democratic justification for voting by citizens who reside permanently abroad.
People living elsewhere may influence decisions whose ordinary consequences fall primarily on residents. Yet there are legitimate reasons to defend expatriate voting: family connections, property, legal obligations, intentions to return, and involuntary displacement. We should not treat every nonresident citizen alike.
Still, the comparison exposes an imbalance. One person may retain voting rights through nationality after decades abroad. Another may remain excluded despite decades of residence.
The conclusion I draw is that nationality without residence may sometimes be a weaker democratic connection than durable residence without nationality.
This is not a universal rule denying expatriates political rights. It is a reason to question why inherited nationality should automatically prevail over durable residence.
Resident Sovereignty as a Boundary Rule
Resident Sovereignty offers a general institutional response to the democratic boundary problem:
Durable residence, rather than inherited nationality, is the primary basis of ordinary political membership.
The word primary matters. It does not mean exclusive.
People may have meaningful political connections with more than one community. Temporary absence need not erase membership. Those forced to flee may retain political rights in their former home.
Resident Sovereignty does not require abolishing nationality. Nationality may continue to serve legal functions not mechanically governed by residence. Residence itself must not become a new master status determining every right or obligation.
This also bears on Hand Democracy and Foot Democracy. Collective self-government requires a political community, but its current members cannot claim unlimited authority to exclude durable residents forever. Political-community choice, in turn, does not eliminate every legitimate institutional condition of membership.
The boundary must be worked out through institutions that respect both dimensions of political freedom.
Membership Must Be Secure
Entry into full political membership is not enough if membership remains permanently insecure.
Suppose two people have become full political members. One possesses only the country’s nationality; the other also possesses another nationality. Should the second person’s political membership remain more vulnerable simply because another nationality exists?
Membership Security addresses this problem. Once full political membership has been established, possession of another nationality should not, by itself, leave someone removable under ordinary immigration-law rules.
British law offers an illustration. Section 40 of the British Nationality Act 1981 provides for deprivation of citizenship in specified circumstances. For deprivation deemed conducive to the public good, the law generally bars making a person stateless, subject to a limited exception involving certain naturalized citizens and further statutory conditions. Deprivation for fraud is addressed separately.
This does not mean all dual nationals are automatically vulnerable to deprivation. It shows how citizenship security can depend partly on nationality circumstances. The broader question is whether full political membership can remain less secure merely because another nationality is available.
Resident Sovereignty concerns the basis for entering ordinary political membership; Membership Security concerns the stability of full membership once established.
The Difficult Cases
No boundary principle resolves every case. Multiple residence, temporary absence, and political connections across borders may require special rules.
Forced displacement is especially important. Someone driven from home by war or persecution should not automatically lose established political membership because physical residence has become impossible. That would turn a principle intended to reduce arbitrary exclusion into another means of exclusion.
These cases require careful institutional judgment, but do not remove the need for an ordinary rule.
Democracy Must Justify Its Boundary
We began with two people living on the same street. Both have built their lives within the same political community. Yet one may participate in national democratic decisions while the other remains excluded because of nationality.
Whelan shows why democratic procedures cannot by themselves determine who belongs to the people. Goodin reminds us that political decisions affect people beyond borders. Dahl directs attention to those subject to binding collective decisions. López-Guerra questions the claims of citizens no longer resident in the community.
Resident Sovereignty draws on these concerns to offer an institutional answer. Durable residence connects people to a political community through continuing governance, institutional dependence, and participation in shared institutions. It therefore offers a stronger ordinary justification for political membership than inherited nationality alone.
This does not eliminate nationality or political boundaries. It does not grant immediate full membership to everyone who crosses a border. Nor does it deny legitimate political connections with several communities.
It means that sufficiently durable residence must open a meaningful route toward full political membership.
The point is not that democracy can avoid defining its people. It cannot.
The point is that democracy must be able to justify its boundaries to those who live under them.
If a person has durably made a political community the place where life is lived, laws are obeyed, institutions are relied upon, and a future is built, what justifies continuing to treat that person as outside "the people"?
That is the question Resident Sovereignty asks us to answer.
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: "From Nationality to Residence" (Article 08); "What Becomes of Nationality?" (Article 14); "Ayelet Shachar and the Birthright Lottery" (Article 07).
Key concepts: Resident Sovereignty; Foot Democracy.
References
- Frederick G. Whelan, "Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem," in Nomos XXV: Liberal Democracy, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York University Press, 1983), 13–47.
- Robert E. Goodin, "Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives," Philosophy & Public Affairs 35, no. 1 (2007): 40–68.
- Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), Chapter 9.
- Claudio López-Guerra, "Should Expatriates Vote?" The Journal of Political Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2005): 216–234.
- British Nationality Act 1981, section 40, as amended.
