(iPoster) Migration Policymaking: Impact of Citizenship Law on Political Calculation

• In Event: Poster Session: International Political Economy II

Abstract

Why do political parties in democratic countries hold different preferences over migration issues? I argue that citizenship law (jus soli, jus sanguinis, and jus domicile principles) impacts migration policymaking in consolidated democracies, which function largely as destination countries from a global perspective. Here, I focus on a politician’s preference formation process and assume that a politician would push for a migration policy that would increase his probability of remaining in office. To achieve this, he needs to strategically calculate how to maximize his vote share. In this sense, citizenship law changes the size of the electorate since liberal citizenship law (jus soli rule in addition to relaxed jus domicile rule) enlarges a chance that initial migrants and their children obtain citizenship compared to its counterpart does. Thus, I hypothesize that politicians in liberal citizenship regimes prefer to enact more generous migration policies due to a higher probability that migrants’ votes will count. Specific hypotheses are generated based on local-level migrant stock, the strength of populist parties, and compositions of governments (parliamentary versus presidential systems as well as fragmentation of the government).

In order to assess the validity of this argument, I rely on statistical analyses by using Chapel Hill Expert Survey (1999~2014) and Manifesto Project dataset (2009~2018), along with various measures on citizenship regime, such as Migrant Integration Policy Index (2015) and a dataset on migrant rights by Fitzgerald, Leblang, and Teets (2014; self-updated up to 2018). The implications based on multilevel regression analyses are two-folds: First, in general, political parties in countries under liberal citizenship law tend to be more generous toward immigration policies as well as multiculturalism. Second, analyses focusing on subsets of citizenship regime yield some mixed findings. While an acceptance of dual nationality (under naturalization procedure) yields a positive impact on parties’ positions on multiculturalism, provision of birthright citizenship lets parties become more restrictive against immigration policies, which is contrary to the proposed hypothesis. This paper ends with a conclusion that suggests potential mechanisms behind the subsets of citizenship regime while highlighting an importance to disaggregate impacts of citizenship laws.

Author

• Yujin Woo, Hitotsubashi University