Suffrage is a central element of democracy. Over time, electoral rights have increasingly become available to migrants—both as non-citizen residents and as non-resident citizens. However, existing datasets either focus on only one of those categories, exclude candidacy rights, or have limited temporal and geographic scope. The GLOBALCIT Dataset of Migrant Electoral Rights (MER) is the most comprehensive dataset on migrant suffrage to date. MER covers voting and candidacy rights for both non-citizen residents and non-resident citizens. 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 transparency, 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.
The dataset is publicly available in Cadmus, the EUI Data Repository, here. It includes a datafile in cvs format, a detailed Codebook and an accompanying Factbook containing the most relevant information on electoral rights for each country in the dataset.
MER was developed by Sebastián Umpierrez de Reguero, Klaudia Wegschaider and Rainer Bauböck.
The following articles and preprints using MER have been published:
Klaudia Wegschaider, Rainer Bauböck, Sebastián Umpierrez de Reguero. “Incongruent Suffrage“. APSA Preprint, 29 September 2025. doi: https://doi.org/10.33774/apsa-2025-f6p70
Sebastián Umpierrez de Reguero, Rainer Bauböck, and Klaudia Wegschaider: “Evaluating special representation of non-resident citizens: Eligibility, constituency and proportionality”. International Migration 63(2), May 2024. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13263
Klaudia Wegschaider, Sebastián Umpierrez de Reguero, and Rainer Bauböck. “Migrant Franchise Constellations”. APSA Preprints, September 2025. https://doi.org/10.33774/apsa-2025-fb5l7
MER builds on the ELECLAW and CER indicators. Compared to MER, ELECLAW and CER cover fewer countries and years. However, they additionally include information on the voting rights of resident citizens.