Abstract
This article assesses the effect of naturalization and inclusive citizenship regimes on immigrants’ conventional and unconventional political participation in 26 European countries. I argue that both naturalization and inclusive citizenship regimes increase immigrants’ sense of belonging to the country of residence and hence their political engagement. Using data from the European Social Survey and applying matching techniques in order to tackle endogeneity between naturalization and participation, I show that in countries with inclusive citizenship regimes the positive acquisition effect for naturalized immigrants is less pronounced than in more restrictive citizenship regimes. These results indicate that the effect of naturalization is highly dependent on the context of the citizenship regimes, a finding previously unnoticed due to the methodological challenges involved in the highly endogenous process of applying for and acquiring citizenship.
Zusammenfassung
Dieser Beitrag untersucht den Effekt von persönlich erfahrener Einbürgerung und inklusiven Staatsbürgerschaftsregimen auf die politische Partizipation von ImmigrantInnen in 26 europäischen Staaten. Es wird argumentiert, dass beide Faktoren das Zugehörigkeitsgefühl der ImmigrantInnen erhöht. Konkret wird anhand einer Analyse von Individualdaten des European Social Survey (ESS) in Kombination mit einem Matching-Verfahren gezeigt, dass ein positiver Effekt von Einbürgerung auf politische Partizipation besteht. Dieser ist jedoch in inklusiven Staatsbürgerschaftsregimen weitaus schwächer. Die Ergebnisse implizieren, dass der Effekt von Einbürgerung im Kontext der Staatsbürgerschaftsregime betrachtet werden sollte.
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Notes
For an overview of the included countries, see Table 3.
The descriptive statistics can be found in Table 4.
These are: years spent in the country of residence, gender, age, education, language skills, and trust.
I ran four different matching methods using the MatchIt package in R: Coarsened Exact, subclass, nearest neighbor, and full matching. Results are available upon request. Comparing the covariates’ differences in means between the treated and control group, the trade-off between reduction in means and losing too many observations was best for subclass matching.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Peter Thisted Dinesen, Rainer Bauböck, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments and suggestions. I am also grateful for the very insightful remarks provided by the participants of the author workshop that was held in preparation for this special issue.
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Hunger, S. No naturalization, no participation?. Z Vgl Polit Wiss 12, 279–296 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-017-0373-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-017-0373-6