Citizenship, Democracy, and Political Inclusion

This project examines why some states make national citizenship accessible and others do not, and whether democratic pressure pushes states towards inclusion. Citizenship laws are important to study because they simultaneously define who can participate in a national election and who belongs in the nation. And while autocratic contexts may not provide opportunities to formally participate like democracies, shaping a cohesive nation remains an important goal. Is citizenship law more inclusive in democracies than autocracies? To examine the political factors that determine citizenship policy, this project collects global data of laws for gaining and losing citizenship, across countries and over time. With this comparative view, the project can examine the relationship between regime values and how states define their national communities. This project advances prosperity and welfare, especially in terms of how obtaining citizenship can create security and opportunity for immigrants and diasporic communities. While existing scholarship focuses largely on contemporary politics, ranging from the role of far-right political parties and social mobilization to court decisions, there is a lack of theories that considers factors beyond democratic politics. This project theorizes that regime-level factors create meaningful contexts for understanding variation in citizenship policy settings. As a result, democracies and autocracies may both maintain similarly accessible (or restrictive) citizenship laws but be motivated by distinct reasons. To test this and related arguments, the project will conduct statistical analysis with original data, obtained by building an expanded Global Citizenship Law Dataset, which describes laws for gaining and losing citizenship, across 191 countries and between the years 1960 and 2024. This research will make significant contributions to scholarly literature on citizenship and migration, public policymaking, welfare, immigration politics, and democratization. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.