Suchergebnisse

The United States incarcerates far more people than any other country in the world, at rates nearly ten times higher than other liberal democracies. Indeed, while the U.S. is home to 5 percent of the world's population, it contains nearly 25 percent of its prisoners. But the extent of American cruelty goes beyond simply locking people up. At every stage of the criminal justice process-plea bargaining, sentencing, prison conditions, rehabilitation, parole, and societal reentry-the US is harsher and more punitive than other comparable countries. In Unusually Cruel, Marc Morjé Howard argues that.

This article puts the 1999 German Nationality Act into a comparative European perspective. By applying a common measure of the relative restrictiveness or inclusiveness of a country's citizenship policy to the countries of the EU-15 at two different time periods, it provides an analysis of change both within and across countries. From this perspective, Germany has clearly moved "up" from having the single most restrictive law before the 1999 reform to a more moderate policy today. Yet Germany's major "liberalizing change" was also tempered by a significant "restrictive backlash." The German case therefore provides support for a broader theoretical argument about the potential for mobilized anti-immigrant public opinion to nullify the liberalization that often occurs within the realm of elite politics.

Until recently, Germany was viewed as having an outdated and restrictive citizenship policy that was impervious to demographic realities and liberalising trends. Yet despite many predictions of continuity, Germany's policies have undergone considerable changes over the past decade. Indeed, the German Nationality Act of 2000 represented a liberalisation of Germany's notorious 1913 law, yet the new law did not go nearly as far as the Schröder government had hoped and planned - largely due to a massive anti-immigrant petition campaign. This article traces the historical context in which German citizenship policy has developed and evolved, and it speculates about the longer-term effects of the 2000 law in terms of creating a new definition and perception of what it means to be German. The detailed focus on the German case also helps to illustrate more general arguments about the politics of citizenship. In particular, it shows how an elite-driven process can lead to liberalising change, but also how the mobilisation of xenophobia can lead to a sudden and restrictive backlash. (German Politics / FUB)

While the concept of citizenship has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years, few studies focus on the increasingly prevalent reality of dual citizenship, or full membership – with its respective rights, privileges, and obligations – in two different countries. The main objective of this article is to conceptualize, measure, and classify variation in dual citizenship in the countries of the European Union. I start by recounting the historical opposition to dual citizenship and by describing its emergence in recent decades. I then develop a "Citizenship Policy Index" that accounts for some of the intricacies associated with citizenship policies in general and dual citizenship policies in particular. I go on to apply these measures to the fifteen "older" EU countries in both the 1980s and the contemporary period – thus allowing for an analysis of the changes that have taken place over the past two decades – while also briefly examining the current policies of the ten new EU members. Overall, the findings point to surprisingly resilient national differences that stand out in contrast to the EU's institutional "harmonization" in so many other areas.