In recent decades we have seen a dramatic rise of dual citizenship; many states are now officially accepting dual citizenship and many people use the opportunity to formalize their multiple affiliations. Switzerland accepted dual citizenship in 1992 already. Today almost twenty per cent of the Swiss population has more than one passport. In other states, such as Germany however, dual citizenship is (still) forbidden and very contested. It is especially feared that “one cannot serve two masters”, that loyalty towards the state is undermined and thus national cohesion and democracy. Others again conceive of dual citizens as vanguard of citizenship identities and practices above and across nation states, and as an important source for democratizing a globalizing world order.
However, these fears and hopes are usually built upon speculations. The actual empirical consequences of such a dual status are not well understood due to a lack of comparative data on this specific group. Financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation, we conducted a large scale representative survey among Swiss dual citizens in the beginning of 2013. This survey assesses their political identities and activities in Switzerland but also in the country of their second nationality, in the European Union and beyond. The proposed paper will present a first descriptive analysis of this data and compare the results on dual citizens with those on three relevant control groups, namely native and naturalized Swiss citizens without a second nationality and foreign residents. This comparison will allow tracing eventual differences in national, transnational and cosmopolitan political identities and activities of dual citizens in Switzerland. We will thus be able to evaluate empirically whether transnational ties and membership in multiple national communities hinder political identity and involvement in the country of residence, and/ or whether they facilitate the development of supranational identities and activities.
