A dyadic approach to global dual citizenship acceptance: data, trends and correlates

Organised by

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• GGP: Global Governance Programme
• GlobalCit: Global Citzenship Observatory

As an unprecedented number of migrants and their descendants around the world have legitimate citizenship claims vis-à-vis more than one country, ever more states accept the possibility of holding dual citizenship. This paper introduces the GLOBALCIT Dyadic Dual Citizenship Acceptance Dataset (GcDDCAD), a dataset that addresses the need for longitudinal and continuously updated information on the legal constellations regulating access to dual citizenship. Going back to 1960, the data cover 1.8 million directed dyad-year observations measuring the legal rules for holding dual citizenship after a person of country A acquires the citizenship of country B.. We identify monadic and dyadic regulatory trends and present estimates of the number and proportion of global migrants that are affected by changing policy constellations, as well as how acceptance varies between political regime dyads. We show that migrants are more likely to acquire destination country citizenship, and thus achieve democratic representation, in constellations where they can maintain a legal link with their origin country. This dataset enables researchers and policymakers to explore the global trends and empirical determinants and effects of dual citizenship acceptance.

Speaker: Maarten Vink, EUI