Working Paper

Co-authored with Lea Portmann, Frowin Rausis, Joachim Blatter, and Philipp Lutz, this paper compares the drivers of the diffusion of two key liberal and illiberal asylum policies worldwide.

Do liberal and illiberal policies diffuse through distinct mechanisms? We examine this question in the increasingly salient asylum policy field. Drawing on an original dataset and a new typology of mechanisms, we systematically compare the diffusion of a foundational liberal policy – National Asylum Frameworks (NAFs) – and a crucial illiberal policy – Safe Third Country Policies (STCPs) across the globe. Event history models show that these policies diffuse through different but partly overlapping sets of mechanisms. Three findings stand out. First, we confirm that negative externalities strongly drive STCP diffusion and show that positive externalities have a moderate effect on NAF diffusion. Second, and surprisingly, European integration robustly predicts only NAF adoptions. Third, while the other mechanisms involve spatial proximity directly or indirectly, shared government ideologies explain NAF adoptions independently from geography. We conclude that liberal and illiberal asylum policy diffusion work differently and call for similar tests in other policy fields.