| Summary: | Long after general male and female enfranchisement, the boundaries of the demos continue to be renegotiated. In the last decades, new demographic groups—immigrants, emigrants, and youth—have been granted the right to vote. So far, the academic literature has studied these expansions as separate phenomena. I argue that the granting of voting rights to each of these demographics should be studied jointly under the umbrella of contemporary enfranchisement, a new frontier of democratisation within established democracies. I propose a theory on how political parties position themselves on enfranchisement proposals. This project draws on three in-depth national and subnational case studies from the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Austria. Each case study is based on several months of detailed archival and interview research on the behaviour and strategies of political parties. I propose that the dynamics of enfranchisement do not so much differ by to-be-enfranchised demographics, but based on whether the to-be-enfranchised are associated with a salient and polarising issue dimension. This determines the scope of the audience that political parties cater to in the enfranchisement process. In a quiet scenario, decision-making is based on the signals received by and sent to the to-be-enfranchised voters. In a politicised scenario, party strategies are instead oriented toward the opinions of the current electorate. This theory goes beyond the electoral interests versus ideology debate that defines existing work on this topic and it exemplifies that broader insights can be gained from studying enfranchisement across demographic groups.
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