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Explaining Citizenship Light in the Context of Direct Democracy

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Explaining Citizenship Light in the Context of Direct Democracy 1 Explaining citizenship light in the context of direct democracy Dissertation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Lucerne handed in by Francesco Veri Accepted on 04.04.2019 on request by Prof. Dr. Joachim Blatter (University of Lucerne), First Supervisor Prof. Dr. Daniele Caramani (University of Zurich), Second Supervisor LUCERNE, 2019 DOI: Lucerne Open Repository [LORY]: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2972623 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 2 Author’s declarations 1) I hereby declare that I have written the submitted dissertation myself and have properly cited any materials or content expressly used in this process. 2) I hereby declare that this dissertation has not been previously submitted to any faculty, either in its present form, or in another version. Nor has this dissertation been submitted to any other institution. Francesco Veri 3 Abstract The extension of citizenship rights – i.e. citizenship light (CL) - in modern liberal states has been only studied in the context of representative democratic arena. Explanation regarding citizenship rights extension and restriction have not been yet clarified in the context of direct democracy. The direct democratic decision-making process differs from the representative democratic one, this imply that the conditions that explain the CL extension or restriction in the direct democratic arena are different to the conditions that explain the same phenomenon in the representative democratic arena. Indeed the direct democratic arena decision making process is characterized by two major hurdles which are absent in the representative democratic arena. First, in the direct democratic arena the consensus of voters is required to deliberate policies: without that consent policies are blocked. Second, the conflicts amongst political actors on the direct democratic arena are broader than the ones in the representative democratic arena because of the lack of deliberative spaces that allows every political actors to reach consensus over the CL policies. This PhD thesis aims to individuate under which conditions bills that support citizenship rights extension are successful or unsuccessful in the direct democratic arena. In order to pursue this research, I have undertaken a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of every referendum in western liberal democracy questioning CL policies. I have individuated a total of five theoretically- informed conditions that explain citizenship liberalization and the success of popular votes. I then located these conditions within two configurational hypotheses which suppose how referendum proponents might overtake direct democratic hurdles. The analysis for the success of referendums reveals that the only sufficient path that leads to the popular vote’s success is to insert the sensitive issues into a multifaced bill. As demonstrated by a more in-depth case-analysis, the condition of having multiple issue referendum is sufficient for the success of CL referendum because such condition allows to the reduction of the conflicts amongst political actors and deactivate voters’ negative attitudes towards CL object. Political actors’ conflicts are reduced because multiple issue revisions that involved a CL policy always refers to total constitutional revisions: in this type of revision, political actors reach a consensus over the referendum object before the referendum is held. Meanwhile the deactivation of voters’ negative attitudes towards CL object happen because the sensitive CL object is hidden to voters during the referendum campaign. Finally, the analysis of the failure of referendum reveals that conditions popular initiated referendum opposed by the government and a divided rightwing government together with strong populist parties lead to the CL failure. These conditions leads to CL failure because they raise the conflicts amongst political actors in the direct democratic arena. 4 Acknowledgments My sincere gratitude goes to my supervisor prof. Joachim Blatter. I am very thankful to him for introducing me to the set-theoretic methods and for his suggestions that helped to overtake all the difficulties that I faced during this research. I would also like to express my gratitude to my co-supervisor prof Daniele Caramani for reviewing and being part of this important project. Finally I am really grateful to my family, my wife Jane, my children Francis, Samuele and Stella for their love. Without them this thesis would never have been written. 5 Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................ 3 Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................................ 4 List of figures ....................................................................................................................................... 9 List of tables ......................................................................................................................................... 9 List of abbreviations........................................................................................................................... 12 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 14 Research questions ............................................................................................................................. 16 PART I: THEORETICAL CHAPTER 1) Conceptualizing citizenship light as a dependent variable ................................................... 17 1.1) Citizenship light ...................................................................................................................... 17 1.1.1) Citizenship light definition ............................................................................................... 17 1.1.2) The inevitable lightening of citizenship ........................................................................... 18 1.1.3) CL in the context of direct democracy ............................................................................. 18 1.1.4) Citizenship light domain .................................................................................................. 19 1.2) Specification of citizenship: the two dimensions of citizenship ............................................. 21 1.2.1) General definition: citizenship as System of rights and legal status ............................ 21 1.2.2) Normative dimensions of citizenship ............................................................................... 22 1.3) Operationalization: Policies concerning the two dimensions of citizenship........................... 26 1.3.1) Individual citizenship policies in the direct democratic context ...................................... 26 1.3.2) Collective citizenship policies in the direct democratic context ...................................... 29 2) Existing explanations on extension and restrictions of CL ................................................... 31 2.1) Government ideology (LEFT, ~LEFT) ................................................................................... 32 2.2) Presence or absence of strong far right populist parties (POP, ~POP) ................................... 33 3) Further potential explanation of restriction of CL in the context of popular votes ........... 34 3.1) Popular initiated referendums (INI, ~INI) .............................................................................. 34 3.2) Political elite cohesive or split the referendum (ELITE, ~ELITE) ......................................... 35 3.3) Referendum with multiple or single issues (MULT, ~MULT) .............................................. 36 4) Expected causal configurations ............................................................................................... 36 4.1) Hurdles in the direct democracy arena .................................................................................... 37 6 4.2) Configurational condition for the CL success in the context of the direct democratic arena . 38 4.3) Expected configurations in CL failure in the context of direct democracy ............................ 41 5) Other conditions not considered................................................................................................. 42 5.1) Conditions built considering their probabilistic effects .......................................................... 42 5.2) Circumstantial conditions that are intrinsic to the ontology of existent conditions ................ 44 5.3) Conditions covered by the analysis process ............................................................................ 44 5.4) Conditions not applicable to our context ................................................................................ 45 6) Case selection ............................................................................................................................... 46 6.1) Scope conditions and other criteria ......................................................................................... 46 6.1.1) Scope condition ................................................................................................................ 46 6.1.2) Period studied and context ..............................................................................................
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