Lorenzo Piccoli

European University Institute | EUI · Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies

The electoral franchise has become more universal as restrictions based on criteria such as sex or property have been lifted throughout the process of democratisation. Yet, a broad range of exclusions has persisted to this date, making the suffrage non-universal, even in established democracies. In this article, we present ELECLAW, a new set of ind...

Why does undocumented migrants’ access to healthcare beyond urgent treatment differ across the territory of the same state? Through a comparison of Italian regions and Spanish autonomous communities, this paper contends that traditions of regional citizenship shape policy choices in significant ways. In particular, pre-existing norms of regional pr...

This research note introduces a new global dataset, the Citizenship, Migration and Mobility in a Pandemic (CMMP). The dataset features systematic information on border closures and domestic lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 outbreak in 211 countries and territories worldwide from 1 March to 1 June 2020. It documents the evolution of the types a...

Over the last fifty years, eighteen regional assemblies in Europe have debated the extension of voting rights to foreign residents. Yet only Scotland and the Swiss cantons of Neuchâtel and Jura have adopted such legislation. What explains this variation? Through a comparison of debates that have taken place in Italy and Switzerland, I show that mul...

Background The health of undocumented immigrants is an important concern in most societies. However, there is no conclusive evidence that inclusive health care policies lead to better outcomes for this group of the population. The aim of this study is to analyse whether there is an association between inclusive health care policies and the mortalit...

The global Directory of Migration Research Institutions (DMRI) provides a comprehensive mapping of dedicated centres and institutes that pool resources for training researchers with special focuses on migration in the period between 1945 and 2020, with information on their location, year of establishment, the size, the type, and the main subjects o...

The study of international migration and responses to it has experienced rapid growth in the last three decades: an institutionalisation of migration studies. This paper identifies and specifies infrastructural and semantic elements of institutionalisation by establishing a global Directory of Migration Research Institutions identifying 282 institu...

Collective regularisation programmes providing legal status to unauthorised immigrants were frequently used by European countries until the late 2000s, when they fell out of fashion. In 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, some European governments made use of collective regularisations again, breaking this “taboo”, while others did not. Wh...

Every government in the world introduced restrictions to human mobility – that is, the movement of persons across and within state borders – in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Such restrictions thus constituted a global phenomenon, but they were by no means globally uniform; rather, they varied significantly between and within states, as well as...

The study of transnationalism raises important questions about the effects of political rights that international migrants enjoy in different places. We contribute to this debate asking the following question: Do international migrants who retain voting rights in the place of origin have a greater propensity to vote in the local elections of the co...

Questo articolo propone un'analisi preliminare di tre importanti cambiamenti in-dotti dalla pandemia di COVID-19 su quello che è stato definito "il regime globale di mobilità" (Schiller e Salazar, 2013), o l'insieme delle regole e dei meccanismi in-ternazionali di governance che normalizzano gli spostamenti di alcuni viaggiatori e criminalizzano qu...

This chapter presents the policies of Swiss institutions in their dealings with Swiss abroad, with a specific focus on the area of social protection. It shows how the Federal Council gained control over a large network of institutions during a relatively short period of time. Since the 1960s, the Federal Council has developed encompassing social pr...

Conditions for Electoral Rights data include information on conditions for eligibility and access to voting and candidacy rights in the 28 EU Member States, Switzerland, 20 American countries, Australia and New Zealand based on electoral laws in 2015, 2017, and 2019. The dataset also includes the information for 2013 in the 28 EU Member States. The...

This article challenges the idea that territorial rescaling invariably leads to a race to the bottom in the provision of rights for vulnerable subjects. Instead, the comparison of two regions in Italy and two cantons in Switzerland shows that subnational governments make different choices reflecting the preferences of their voters. While focusing o...

In the Swiss federal context, the acquisition of citizenship through ordinary naturalization, the enjoyment of electoral rights as a foreign resident, and the retention of the franchise as a Swiss citizen abroad is not uniformly defined through a single federal law but co-determined by the cantons. In this explanatory note, we introduce SWISSCIT, a...

The chapter brings together the concepts of ‘region’ and ‘citizenship’ under the common umbrella of multilevel citizenship theory. The objective is to demonstrate that in a world in which boundaries are relatively open and several political institutions compete for power, the definition of rights depends less on static national regimes and more on...

Over the last forty years, regions in Europe have acquired an increasingly important role in the provision of rights that were traditionally used by states to define the boundaries of national citizenship. Despite this trend, there are still few comparative examinations of what citizenship means for subnational actors, how these affect the provisio...

The Index on Citizenship Law in Switzerland measures the relative inclusiveness of legislation on ordinary naturalization and access to electoral rights for foreign nationals across Switzerland’s 26 cantons as of 2017.

Recent scholarly research has shown that the traditional Westphalian notion of citi- zenship has been challenged by developments beyond the boundaries of the nation- state. Nonetheless, while significant attention has been devoted to the emergence of spheres of citizenship above the nation-state, little reference has been made to specific forms of...

The interaction of norms of democratic inclusion in multi-level states might lead to divergent ideas about citizenship and rights across different territorial levels of government. Theoretically, it could be imagined that a person is treated as a citizen with full social rights by the regional authorities, while having no legal citizenship status i...

The EUDO CITIZENSHIP Conditions for Electoral Rights 2015 (CER 2015) includes information on the conditions and procedures of access to the franchise in the 28 EU Member States and in 20 American countries, in 13 types of elections and for 3 categories of persons: citizen residents, non-citizen residents, and non-resident citizens. The database is...

Following the research agenda introduced by Will Kymlicka, this qualitative study offers an interpretation of how the sub-national elites of Québec and South Tyrol police the integration of immigrants. For these national minority groups, which are constantly undergoing a process of redefinition of their collective identities by differentiating them...

The issue of minorities has long been perceived as an obstacle to European integration. This paper seeks to unravel the complex nature of minority language (ML) policy in the European Union (EU), arguing that a long way has been travelled since 1981. From that moment onwards, the European Parliament (EP) began dealing with minority issues starting...