Do inclusive societies need closed borders? The association between immigration and citizenship regimes

Ph.D. thesis

Samuel D. Schmid
Florence: European University Institute, Department of Political and Social Sciences, 2021

DOI: 10.2870/086528

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APA Click to copy
Schmid, S. D. (2021). Do inclusive societies need closed borders? The association between immigration and citizenship regimes (PhD thesis). Florence: European University Institute, Department of Political and Social Sciences. https://doi.org/10.2870/086528

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Schmid, Samuel D. “Do Inclusive Societies Need Closed Borders? The Association between Immigration and Citizenship Regimes.” PhD thesis, Florence: European University Institute, Department of Political and Social Sciences, 2021.

MLA Click to copy
Schmid, Samuel D. Do Inclusive Societies Need Closed Borders? The Association between Immigration and Citizenship Regimes. Florence: European University Institute, Department of Political and Social Sciences, 2021, doi:10.2870/086528.

BibTeX Click to copy

@phdthesis{samuel2021a,
  title = {Do inclusive societies need closed borders? The association between immigration and citizenship regimes},
  year = {2021},
  institution = {Florence: European University Institute, Department of Political and Social Sciences},
  doi = {10.2870/086528},
  author = {Schmid, Samuel D.}
}

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This thesis has received an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Maria Ioannis Baganha Dissertation Award sponsored by IMISCOE, Europe's largest interdisciplinary research network in migration studies.

Abstract
Many political theorists assume that the openness of immigration and the inclusiveness of citizenship trade off. Yet, there is no consistent empirical evidence for this negative relationship. This dissertation advances three papers to investigate the association between immigration regimes and citizenship regimes. The first paper introduces a new citizenship policy dataset and charts policy trends. I find a liberalizing trajectory that has stagnated, as well as long-term convergence in citizenship regimes across 23 democracies 1980-2019. In addition, I advance index methodology by introducing the idea of confirmatory dimensionality testing within a three-level approach to concept formation. The second paper maps immigration and citizenship regimes in a novel and empirically validated two-dimensional typological space across those cases until 2010. Overall, boundary regimes have become more open-inclusive and less closed-exclusive over time. The liberalizing and converging tendencies are especially pronounced in immigration regimes due to liberal constraints. Based on these descriptive analyses, the third paper develops and tests the boundary politics framework across 23 democracies 1980-2010. It shows that, as theorized, in cases in which immigration-related issues are not politicized, immigration and citizenship regimes do not correlate. When immigration is politicized, immigration regime openness and citizenship regime inclusiveness correlate positively as they become part of the same cultural dimension of party politics, yet they only do so after the Cold War. The evidence shows further that the strong liberal constraints that immigration regimes are exposed to cannot be fully suppressed even when nativists are strong, while citizenship regimes respond to nativist party power and become more exclusive even when immigration is not politicized. These empirical findings corroborate but also qualify the boundary politics framework. They also provoke some surprising implications for various ideal typical positions in normative theory. The allegedly unrealistic liberal-cosmopolitan vision of open inclusive boundary regimes emerges as the least troubled stance.

Comments from the external examiners on my thesis committee

⚜️

I believe this is a truly impressive doctoral dissertation. I thoroughly appreciated its theoretical richness, empirical rigor, originality, ambition to advance and contribute to ongoing debates in professional political science, and dialogue between empirical and normative debates. In my experience after graduating at the European University Institute myself, close to 10 years at the University of Oxford, and more than 2 years at the University of Glasgow, it is not rare to see one of these features in a good dissertation. However, it is rare to find all of those features at once in an outstanding thesis.

Sergi Pardos-Prado, Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Glasgow

✨️

I can confidently say that I have not seen a more proficient demonstration of statistical methods as applied to citizenship and immigration than demonstrated in this document. Sam Schmid also uses this text as an opportunity to illustrate not only a proficiency but an artistry to data visualization.

Sara Wallace Goodman, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine