Study: How Does Allowing Noncitizens to Vote Affect Local Government?

The  Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University has released a new study, How Does Allowing Noncitizens to Vote Affect Local Government? The major findings of the study are:

A major function of local governments is to provide services like schools, law enforcement, parks, and infrastructure. 

Allowing foreign-born residents to vote improves a local government’s ability to align public goods with the preferences of community members using them.

Public goods would be better optimized with feedback from the entire local community—all of whom pay local property and sales taxes

Here is the Executive Summary:

“In December 2021, the New York City Council passed a law that gave local voting rights to legal residents, including 800,000 noncitizens. Six months later, a state appellate judge ruled the law violated the state constitution. In June of 2023, a panel of four appellate judges heard arguments on both sides of the debate. They are expected to rule on the case sometime this fall.
At first glance, the idea of giving noncitizens the right to vote seems nonsensical. Shouldn’t voting be a privilege reserved for actual citizens?

But what about the residents who live, work, go to school, and pay taxes in a community? Is refusing voting rights to legal residents, citizens or not, the same as taxation without representation? How would laws like the one in New York City change local governments and the services they provide?

In this paper, professors Dean Strow and Claudia Strow from Palm Beach Atlantic University discuss immigrants’ potential influence on local governments in the context of two well-known public finance models: Lindahl pricing and the Tiebout model of residents “voting with their feet.”

A major function of local governments is to provide services like schools, law enforcement, parks, and infrastructure. Economists call these public goods. As the authors argue, allowing foreign-born residents to vote, regardless of immigration status, improves a local government’s ability to align public goods with the preferences of community members using them.

Lindahl pricing relies on the ability of governments to accurately assess the preferences of their resident taxpayers (i.e., listening to taxpayers’ voices at the ballot box). The Tiebout model relies on residents’ ability to shop around for the best public goods. For example, parents might move from one school district to another based on educational preferences.

The authors demonstrate that Tiebout sorting is already playing out at the state and local level as residents move to areas with public goods they prefer. They find that allowing broader franchisement of all residents would give policymakers more direct feedback about the community’s public goods as well as residents’ willingness to pay for them.

Public goods would be better optimized with feedback from the entire local community—all of whom pay local property and sales taxes.”

KJ