From Full Discretion to Restriction? The Development of Economic Requirements for Naturalisation in Western European Countries

Several Western European countries demand some degree of economic performance or self-sufficiency from migrants who apply for naturalisation, thus making citizenship and therefore access to most electoral rights conditional upon economic status. Although such criteria are sometimes covered in indices on citizenship policy (Huddleston et al. 2011; Koopmans et al. 2012; Vink and Bauböck 2013), we know very little about their development and different types of economic requirements for naturalisation. This paper first aims to provide an overview of the diffusion of these requirements in the EU-15 over the period of 1995 to 2014, showing that the number of countries applying such requirements increases over time, but vary in terms of their particularity, with some countries applying economic requirements to virtually all forms of citizenship acquisition after birth, while other constrain their application to a narrow concept of “ordinary” naturalisation. Second, the papers investigates the conditions under which economic requirements for naturalisation were introduced or strengthened. For this purpose, eight instances of policy change are selected for in-depth scrutiny. Building on a most different systems with similar outcomes (MSDO) research design, I investigate the intersection of institutional structures, policy design, and power resources of political parties leading to changes in economic requirements for naturalisation. I show that making access to citizenship conditional upon economic status may be regarded as an objective of parties of the political right, but only when taking changes in the discretionary character of naturalisation into consideration: Economic requirements are also introduced by the political left, trying to transform naturalisation from a fully discretionary procedure to a ‘rule-based routine’ (Joppke 2007), which may make citizenship more accessible for immigrants despite adding formal requirements. These findings may have important implications for the study of citizenship and immigration policy in general, showing that administrative discretion need to be considered both as factor contributing to policy change as well as factor for assessing policy change in terms of inclusion and exclusion.