Historians have documented that the expansion of the franchise over time looks more like the index of the stock market than a straight ascending line; it is a sequence with ups and downs, but the tendency has always been toward greater inclusiveness. Where are we now? Milena Tripković suggests that criminal offenders are today the only group of sane adult citizens residing in democracies to still be excluded. This is not entirely accurate, however. Active members of the military are not allowed to vote in several democratic countries; Colombia, with a half-million persons serving in the armed forces, is a notable example. But the case of felons is surely the most common and significant one. The goal of Tripković’s stimulating book is not only to provide a normative framework for thinking about the disenfranchisement of felons. It also seeks to evaluate, on the basis of that framework, the concrete ways in which contemporary democracies institutionalize the exclusion of criminals from the electoral process.

What are the specific policies barring criminals from electoral participation in democratic countries? Tripković compellingly shows that previous studies have failed to provide a complete and accurate answer to this question. The main finding of her own empirical inquiry is that there are many different regimes, no single one of which disenfranchises all criminal offenders. Tripković’s empirical study is definitely an important contribution, so much so that one can only lament that it is limited to European democracies. It would be even more valuable if it included democracies in all parts of the world. Tripković also makes it clear from the outset that she is interested in evaluating only the practices of democratic polities. Yet why did she include countries like Azerbaijan that, by any reasonable standard, are not democracies? A final worry is that Tripković does not seem to have fully closed the circle: the book lacks a section explicitly assessing the policies of the various countries in light of her normative theory. Which European countries are closer to the ideal? The reader would have to return to the empirical chapter (chap. 3) to try to figure it out, and the answer would not be at all obvious.

The bulk of the book is devoted to defending two fundamental claims. The first refers to the nature of (criminal) disenfranchisement. Tripković argues that it cannot be considered a form of punishment. Indeed, her point is not that disenfranchisement is a way of punishing people that can never be justified, but that it cannot actually be regarded—nor therefore justified—as a form of punishment. To make her point, Tripković puts forward a theory of the conditions that an act has to meet to properly qualify as punishment. On her account, punishment has four central features. First, it is the “principal and sufficient reaction of the state to the crime committed” (p. 52; all italics are in the original). Second, it is “guided by the notion of ultima ratio”; namely, it is “the last resort for responding to social problems” (p. 53). Third, it is based “upon the estimate of blameworthiness of culpability of the offender” (p. 54). Finally, it is “determined by the proportionality principle” (p. 54). Tripković argues that disenfranchisement does not exhibit any of these features and hence cannot be properly considered as punishment.

Let us suppose that this conception of punishment is correct. The problem is that Tripković assumes, without argument, that any specific act against criminal offenders has to exhibit by itself the four features just mentioned to count as punishment. This implies that it would not be true punishment if we subjected a person to a combination of actions—no matter how severe as a whole—unless each of them, in isolation, met the four criteria. For example, Tripković (rightly) claims that disenfranchisement could not suffice as an “independent, stand-alone sanction” against most crimes, thus failing to display the first feature. But this seems to be irrelevant. The question is whether disenfranchisement could plausibly count as an element in a set of actions that together suffice as punishment. Tripković unfortunately does not offer any reasons against this rather intuitive view. Her conclusion is that the nature of disenfranchisement is something else: it is a “citizenship sanction.” Specifically, it is a measure “with the purpose of diminishing the value of one’s citizenship status” in response to purported violations of the basic duties of good citizenship, which may or not happen to be regarded as crimes in a given polity (p. 67).

The second main claim of the book is that disenfranchisement is only justified when a person truly breaks the requirements of citizenship. For Tripković, these are the obligations that “depict the core of the relationship between a citizen and her polity” (p. 71). To violate one’s citizenship requirements is to sever one’s ties with the polity. And when that happens, the grounds for enfranchisement no longer exist. So which are the requirements of citizenship, and which actions count as violations of them? To answer these questions, Tripković examines three different accounts of citizenship requirements, which in her view exhaust all the possibilities. She calls them the “sense of justice” model, the “civic virtue” model, and the “common good” model. Despite their many differences, Tripković contends that, happily, they produce the same result. None of the models justify the exclusion of all criminal offenders but only those of a specific type: “a citizen who has, through committing an illegal act, seriously and irreversibly severed ties with her political community and her fellow co-citizens owing to an incorrigible lack of conscience that acts as an inhibitor to developing and maintaining co-citizen dispositions” (p. 126). Terrorists, spies, and murderers are some of the examples. The key idea is that membership is necessary for enfranchisement and that certain offenses are so serious that they turn the perpetrators into nonmembers.

Tripković, however, does not examine alternative conceptions of membership. On some views, the sheer fact of being indefinitely under the jurisdiction and authority of the state suffices for being counted as a member. Nothing else would be needed in terms of “belonging” to have an equal claim to political rights. (Tripković, by the way, explicitly notes that her theory applies to all long-term residents, not just those who are officially citizens.) The three models that Tripković puts forward simply presuppose a “citizen–polity relationship” that ceases to exist if a citizen performs some wrongful acts. But the reader will not find reasons in support of this presupposition. The claim that this is the only or most plausible account of membership (as a condition for enfranchisement) is not defended.

Consider Tripković’s suggestion that it would be permissible to disenfranchise a spy, for example, even if the polity did not happen to consider espionage a crime. The reason is that the spy would have irreparably broken the citizen–polity relationship that once made him a member, even if nothing else had changed. But it seems implausible to regard such a person—someone who still resides in the polity, is subjected to the jurisdiction of the state, enjoys all other rights, has to pay taxes, can be conscripted, and so on—as a nonmember. If, in response, one were to say that such a person is no longer a (full) member precisely on account of becoming disenfranchised, the argument would become circular, because the theory establishes that disenfranchisement is permissible on account of losing one’s membership through wrongful behavior.

Punishment and Citizenship, even when one disagrees with some of its contents, is a welcome addition to the literature on criminal disenfranchisement. It is a carefully crafted book that anyone interested in the subject should engage with.