This book has been too long in the making. I owe readers, and those who have helped me over a long period of time, some explanation for its lengthy period of genesis. Its origins lie back in the mid-1990s, when Joseph Weiler invited me to present a Specialised Course on ‘European Citizenship’ at the 1995 Session of the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute in Florence. That presentation was eventually published in the Collected Courses of the Academy, and formed the basis for some other early works on citizenship which I make use of in Chapter 2. I was somewhat sceptical in the first instance about working on citizenship, but I am very grateful to Joseph Weiler for pushing me in this direction in the first place.

From an early interest in understanding how European citizenship had (or could have) what Antje Wiener has called a ‘constructive potential’ in the context of European integration and the project of polity-building in a non-state context, a project emerged specifically focusing on the implications of Article 19 of the EC Treaty. This provides for EU citizens resident in a Member State other than their own to be able to vote and stand in local and European Parliamentary elections, and constitutes the core of this book. Along the way, I was lucky enough to collaborate on a number of projects on citizenship topics with Antje Wiener which enabled me to sharpen my understanding of citizenship as an element of polity-building. On the subject of electoral rights specifically, I collaborated with Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione on an ESRC-funded research project, ‘Strategies of Civic Inclusion in Pan-European Civil Society’ (L213 25 2022), which supported a Research Assistantship in 1999–2000 for Stephen Day (now of Oita University, Japan), with whom I have since gone on to publish a number of papers on electoral rights, 1 and on whose early empirical work on Germany, Austria, Estonia and the UK I rely heavily in this book. I am very grateful to the ESRC for this support.