Suchergebnisse

What do citizens do in response to threats to democracy? This book examines the mass politics of civic obligation in the US, UK, and Germany. Exploring threats like foreign interference in elections and polarization, Sara Wallace Goodman shows that citizens respond to threats to democracy as partisans, interpreting civic obligation through a partisan lens that is shaped by their country's political institutions. This divided, partisan citizenship makes democratic problems worse by eroding the national unity required for democratic stability. Employing novel survey experiments in a cross-national research design, Citizenship in Hard Times presents the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of citizenship norms in the face of democratic threat. In showing partisan citizens are not a reliable bulwark against democratic backsliding, Goodman identifies a key vulnerability in the mass politics of democratic order. In times of democratic crisis, defenders of democracy must work to fortify the shared foundations of democratic citizenship.

Why are traditional nation-states newly defining membership and belonging? In the twenty-first century, several Western European states have attached obligatory civic integration requirements as conditions for citizenship and residence, which include language proficiency, country knowledge and value commitments for immigrants. This book examines this membership policy adoption and adaptation through both medium-N analysis and three paired comparisons to argue that while there is convergence in instruments, there is also significant divergence in policy purpose, design and outcomes. To explain this variation, this book focuses on the continuing, dynamic interaction of institutional path dependency and party politics. Through paired comparisons of Austria and Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands and France, this book illustrates how variations in these factors - as well as a variety of causal processes - produce divergent civic integration policy strategies that, ultimately, preserve and anchor national understandings of membership.

This article reviews the field of citizenship studies, with attention to the causes and consequences of policy. It summarizes key findings and points of consensus across three research domains: the determinants of citizenship policy, the consequences of citizenship policy, and the consequences of citizenship, i.e., the utility of obtaining citizenship for immigrant integration. After identifying strengths and weaknesses of each, I propose new directions in research that widen the field in terms of cases and generalizable theory while also deepening the field through serious attention to approaches that center the immigrant experience.

How do citizens define their civic obligation when their country faces a democratic threat? Do citizens of a democracy think it is important to uphold liberal democratic values or to participate in governance? Do they embrace values that protect democracy, or do they just protect their political party or "side"? I examine changes to citizenship norms in the context of democratic threat using observational data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. I compare trends between 2004 and 2019, which show a weakening in the consensus of "good citizen" norms. Specifically, partisans on the left are more likely to value diversity, vigilance, and tolerance; while partisans on the right become more supportive of values like obeying the law. These differences are reduced in consensus-based political systems, but still the consequences are concerning: when the ties of citizenship norms become weaker, so too does national unity, which is integral to democratic legitimacy and stability.

Immigrant‐related policy indexes have become popular in both U.S. and European contexts, yet these projects boast distinct and divergent trajectories. European indices are characterized by rigorous conceptualization, specificity in elements of policy design (e.g., settings like fees or appeal process), and a variety of measurement strategies. By contrast, U.S. state‐level policy indices exhibit a lack of differentiation between immigration and integration policy and excessive generality in measurement and representation of policy instruments and settings, exacerbated in presenting a policy index as an aggregate count. This paper argues U.S. policy indexing can benefit from the European indexing experience. Following an overview of the state of each field, assessing concept differentiation, specification, and measurement in each, the paper illustrates how even the well‐conceived and specified European integration policy indices run into problems at the analysis stage. It presents a replication‐replacement study to illustrate divergent performance of highly correlated and conceptually agreeing indices, as well as methodological issues inherent to indices of low‐N, including using a policy index as a dependent variable and index selection absent a priori theorization. It concludes with suggestions for improving American immigration policy indices, as well as general observations on working with statistical power‐challenged indices and data limitations.

Research on immigration and citizenship has become one of the fastest growing areas in political science, with one trend being the boon of comparative citizenship and immigration policy indices. This article discusses methodological concerns with this enterprise. The first half addresses issues with policy indices, including (a) concept validity and boundary maintenance and (b) measurement, compensability, and aggregate index use. The second half examines why these problems matter in hypothesis testing and for inference by replicating three policy index–using studies, rerunning analyses with different indices to test consistency of findings. These tests underscore a central finding: What scholars know about the effects of immigration and citizenship policy is subject to data and sample selection. The article concludes with a number of recommendations and strategies for moving forward. These approaches will not only strengthen this growing research agenda but also mainstream migrant-related policy studies into larger literatures in comparative politics.