This paper examines theoretically natives’ decision to grant political rights to foreign residents based on their contribution to a redistribution mechanism that finances a private and a public good. I propose a model where agents’ redistributive preferences are determined by their income and cultural beliefs about public spending, which vary across nationalities. I show that under some conditions, low-income natives can gain politically from enfranchising foreigners that are richer than natives on average as long as these foreigners have sufficiently liberal beliefs towards public spending. Moreover, I establish that natives’ support for foreigners’ enfranchisement is a non-monotonic function of these foreigners’ income and cultural beliefs. Rather, these variables influence attitudes towards enfranchisement based on foreigners’ relative taste for the private and the public good. I also provide empirical results in support of my theory using a municipality-level dataset of Swiss referenda about non-citizen voting rights.

本文从理论上检验了土著人根据外国居民对资助私人和公共物品的再分配机制的贡献而授予政治权利的决定。我提出了一个模型，代理人的再分配偏好取决于他们的收入和对公共支出的文化信仰，这些信仰因国籍而异。我表明，在某些情况下，只要这些外国人对公共支出有足够自由的信念，低收入本地人就可以从平均比本地人更富有的外国人中获得政治上的利益。此外，我确定当地人对外国人公民权的支持是这些外国人收入和文化信仰的非单调函数。相当，根据外国人对私人和公共利益的相对品味，这些变量会影响对选举权的态度。我还使用关于非公民投票权的瑞士公民投票的市级数据集提供了实证结果来支持我的理论。