Research project

CitPolDev - Citizenship and Political Development: Membership Contestation and Liberal Norms around the World

Access to citizenship and electoral rights are crucial for how democracies work in practice. Yet the relation between citizenship boundary-setting and democratic government remains understudied. This multiannual research project focuses on the relation between political development and citizenship law inclusiveness.

Linkages between citizenship boundary-setting, franchise expansion and the development of political institutions are understudied. This is remarkable because by defining the demos, citizenship and electoral laws both reflect and determine democratic inclusiveness. The CitPolDev project is a springboard for a new research agenda on the three-way relation between citizenship laws, non-resident voting rights and regime characteristics. The theoretical focus is on processes of norm diffusion and electoral engineering. We develop global longitudinal datasets that allow us to analyse the political regime correlates of key trends in citizenship and electoral laws, as well as their interaction, since the 1960s.

Publications

Going global: opportunities and challenges for the development of a comparative research agenda on citizenship policies at the global level

Citizenship and Migration

Mobility without membership : do we need special passports for vulnerable groups?

This working paper compiles contributions to a GLOBALCIT Forum debate launched by forum co-editors Jelena Džankić and Rainer Bauböck with a proposal to institute an exceptional mobility regime for vulnerable groups.

Modes of acquisition and loss of citizenship around the world : comparative typology and main patterns in 2020

This Working Paper introduces the new GLOBALCIT Citizenship Law Dataset, by discussing the systematised comparative typology of modes of acquisition and loss of citizenship in the new Dataset and describing the main patterns observed around the world in 2020.