DVOJNO DRŽAVLJANSTVO, „UVOZ BIRAČA” I POLITIČKA PRAVA U SRBIJ
DUAL CITIZENSHIP, “VOTER IMPORTATION” AND POLITICAL RIGHTS IN SERBIA

Summary/Abstract: The electoral engineering carried out by the ruling party in Serbia since 2022 by “im­porting voters” shows how it is possible to instrumentalise and political rights in order to affect election results and prolong the competitive authoritarian regime’s stay in power. Since Serbian law allows dual citizenship and offers simplified admission pro­cedures for ethnic Serbs from post­Yugoslav republics (“Serbs in the region”), the rul­ing party has organized the mass admission of ethnic Serbs from the Republic of Srps­ka, the Serb­majority entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, into the citizenship of Serbia, aiming to expand its electorate and influence the elections results in its favour. This paper aspires to shed light on this case by considering the political rights of “Serbs in the region”. While most would not object to ethnic Serbs who live outside Serbia’s borders being granted citizenship and enjoying electoral rights in parliamentary and presidential elections (but not local ones) if it complies with the law, in this paper, the author questions the very principles of inclusion and exclusion from the citizen body that the laws on citizenship and political rights are based on. It is argued that the ex­isting regime privileges transborder ethnic relatives through legal regulation and po­litical manipulation at the expense of those living inside Serbia’s borders (especially disenfranchised immigrants) and is therefore unjust and enabling of the electoral en­gineering in the form of “voter importation”. The argumentation regarding various principles present in citizenship theory that can be used to justify the inclusion and exclusion of “Serbs in the region” as members of the political community and bearers of political rights in Serbia is then considered. The author is unable to find a principle that would offer a definitive answer to this problem, but recognizes the force of the argument for the need for an occasional democratic reconstitution of the body politic so that existing injustices and inequalities would be corrected and emphasizes that, in these processes, it is necessary to take into account the arguments that come from the theories of participatory and agonistic democracy presented in the text.

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