This chapter discusses political rights – including the right to vote, the right to be elected, and the right to petition – as they are protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, other Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made

In recent years, nations around the world have fallen prey to what might be described as a crisis of ineffective government. Basic governmental functions and services, such as ensuring education, health care, and a strong economy, are deeply compromised. Not only does ineffective governance undermine the general welfare, it can also pave the way for authoritarian regimes to take hold in erstwhile democracies. In their bid for power, autocratic leaders have often capitalized on citizens’ disenchantment with governance failures. In response to the rise of authoritarianism in democratic nations, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between constitutionalist structures and democratic sustainability.

In order to solve a constitutional problem, the constitutional lawyer will always use the basic toolkit of arguments discussed in Chapter 3, and as we saw in Chapter 4, the lawyer must also consider the ways in which institutional perspective affects how questions are shaped and answers constructed. There are, furthermore, specific clauses in the written Constitution that merit special attention.

This chapter discusses the protection of the right to vote in the Convention. It examines case law on restriction of the right to vote, in particular residence-based and nationality-based restrictions as well as the case law on voting rights of prisoners.

Chapter 2 details how the distinction between the public and private spheres of citizenship has been implemented through jurisdictional scale, or federalism. Through a mosaic of laws regarding suffrage, immigration, education and public benefits, zoning, civil rights and others, our federal system has designated the national government as the public sphere of identity and civic activity, and local governments as the private sphere of the market and the family. The potential for conflict among the various conceptions of citizenship is muted because their contradictory components are divided into separate spheres and each is then confined to its designated sphere. This chapter also describes, however, how globalization has caused the public/private distinction to break down, and with it, the line between local and national citizenship to become blurred. As that has happened, the contradictions among the three conceptions of citizenship have become more pronounced, resulting in a crisis in the meaning of citizenship and increasing hostility between cities and the state.