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"EUDO Citizenship Observatory a key tool for thinking about future prospects of European citizenship and developing evidence-based policy making in the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice."| EUDO Citizenship Law Indicators |
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EUDO Citizenship Law Indicators (CITLAW) aim to describe and compare characteristic aspects of citizenship laws across countries and over time. Other authors and research teams have constructed indicators that aim to measure how inclusive citizenship laws are for immigrants or how tolerant they are of dual citizenship. The most widely used among these is the MIPEX access to nationality index. The earliest attempt was the LOI Legal Obstacles to Integration Index. More recent indicators for citizenship laws include Marc M. Howard’s Citizenship Policy Index CPI, Thomas Janoski’s Barriers to Naturalization Index BNI, Sara Wallace Goodman’s CIVIX index for naturalisation tests and the ICRI Indicators for Citizenship Rights of Immigrants recently developed by Ruud Koopmans et al. While these earlier indicators are useful for addressing specific research questions about access to citizenship for immigrants, they do not capture the broader range of purposes of citizenship laws. For example, none of the current indicators takes into account how citizenship laws serve to establish legal relations between states and extraterritorial populations of emigrant origin. EUDO CITIZENSHIP will therefore offer a larger set of indicators based on a classification of citizenship law provisions that serve specific purposes, such as securing the intergenerational continuity of the citizenry through birthright acquisition, determining the extent of territorial inclusion of the resident population through ius soli and residence requirements for naturalisation, regulating the overlap with other state’s citizenship regimes through restrictions or toleration of multiple citizenship, maintaining citizenship links with extraterritorial populations and defining target groups and conditions for regular or facilitated naturalisation. EUDO CITLAW indicators build on our typology of modes of acquisition and loss of citizenship and use additional information about conditions and procedures provided by our country experts. Our indicators can be aggregated at different levels in order to analyse more general features of citizenship laws. For example, we present separate indicators for ius sanguinis and ius soli provisions, which can be combined into a single indicator for a country’s birthright regime. Users can also generate their own combined indicators for their specific analytical purposes. CITLAW indicators serve primarily for comparing specific aspects of citizenship regimes across countries and time. Geographic maps and timeline charts visualise these differences. Users will have direct access to our database from which they can create their own comparative tables, maps and graphs. Beyond descriptive analyses, our indicators can serve as dependent variables for testing explanations of why citizenship regimes differ and have changed over time. Used as independent variables, CITLAW indicators allow analysing the impact of legal regimes on citizenship acquisition rates, as measured by our CITACQ indicators, or finding out whether criteria used for selecting naturalisation applicants, such as income, language and civic knowledge tests, impact on their subsequent integration (as measured by CITINT indicators). The construction of EUDO CITLAW indicators is coordinated by Rainer Bauböck at the EUI in cooperation with the research teams at University College Dublin and Maastricht University. |
