Incongruent Suffrage

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 vote-share 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.