Do Legal Regulations Hinder Naturalisation? Citizenship policies and naturalisation rates in Europe

Abstract

This paper investigates a simple relationship: the influence of citizenship regulations on citizenship acquisitions by comparing citizenship policies and naturalisation rates in European countries. The analysis looks at the statistical relationship on the cross-national level. As a quantitative indicator for citizenship policies, the MIPEX Nationality is used, including its different sub-indexes, which measure conditions for access to citizenship, eligibility criteria, security of status as well as regulations concerning dual nationality. The analysis includes a transparent discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach taken in the paper. It can be shown that restricting access to citizenship indeed is related to lower naturalisation rates, and that restricted access to dual citizenship appears to have the most significant impact in EU-25 countries, Norway and Switzerland. However, the analysis shows that such a simple statistical comparison is prone to errors due to, amongst other things, the small number of observations for statistical analyses (i.e. countries), whereby outliers strongly influence the correlation.