Politicians Without Borders: A proposal to abolish the nationality requirement to run for election

Vishal is the winner of the Adam Smith Institute’s 'Young Writer on Liberty' competition. The subject of the competition was '3 Policy Choices to make the UK a Freer Country', and below is one of Vishal's three submissions.

If representative democracy is characterised by the citizens voting for those who they think will represent their interests most accurately – why is this choice restricted? I am referring specifically to the nationality requirement to run for election in all nation-states.

Interestingly, European Parliament elections do not require candidates to be of the same nationality as the citizens of the constituency they hope to represent. For example, Anita Pollack was an Australian who represented a UK constituency, Maurice Duverger was a Frenchman representing Italians, Ari Vatanen was a Finn who represented the French and Monica Frassoni was an Italian who represented Belgians. Why, then, should we be denied such choice when electing individuals to national parliaments?

One may argue that the right must be deprived due to security concerns and because ‘foreigners may not have the country’s best interests at heart’. However, we could say the same for domestic politicians – this is not sufficient. Furthermore, when we consider that there are many humanitarian projects in various countries that involve people of different nationalities, sometimes it might just be reasonable to believe thatpeople actually want to help others, regardless of their nationality!

Currently, all mainstream parties in all countries are nationalist and abolishing the nationality requirement would pave the way for non-nationalist alternatives (at the very least) which may actually help preserve peaceful relations with other countries by providing a voice to those who do not believe in a potentially dangerous, exclusionary nationalist agenda.

Furthermore, the extra competition from foreign nationals might make the transmission of public policy ideas and implementation of public policy more effective. Voters could essentially call for certain foreign politicians to run and ‘import’ politicians whose policies they think they would help the country more than their domestic alternatives (people might prefer, for example, some Scandinavian, German or American MPs). Essentially, domestic politicians would have to increase their performance in response to foreign competition and this would improve overall political performance over time.

After all, if George Osborne can legitimately appoint Mark Carney, a Canadian national, to control the country’s money supply on the grounds of competence, why should the British public not be able to directly elect the foreign politicians whom they would like to see governing the UK? Simply abolishing the nationality requirement and thereby increasing choice for voters would ultimately lead to a net gain in welfare for British society.