Asylum regulations on the move: How safe country policies spread across the globe

During the past 70 years, asylum policies across the globe have been shaped by two major regulatory trends. First, many states recognized their responsibility to protect people who face persecution in their home country and established legally codified National Asylum Frameworks (NAFs). Second, only a few years later, most of them started to limit their responsibility by introducing various forms of Safe Country Policies (SCPs). These policies allow states to reduce their responsibility toward people seeking protection by restricting the access to asylum procedures and refugee protection. For instance, states either reject an asylum application by declaring asylum seekers’ country of origin to be generally safe based on Safe Countries of Origin Policies (SCOPs) or they shift responsibility for asylum processing and refugee protection to another country based on Safe Third Country Policies (STCPs). In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive overview of the spread of NAFs and various SCPs in 195 countries across the globe from 1951 to 2021. This descriptive analysis shows that SCOPs have spread among almost all European countries but only been adopted by a handful of countries in other world regions. STCPs, by contrast, have not only widely spread among states in Europe and other states in the Global North but are increasingly becoming popular in the Global South. In the second part of the paper, we test which mechanisms of policy diffusion can explain the proliferation of two specific SCPs – Safe Third Country Policies (STCPs) and Safe Countries of Origin Policies (SCOPs). Conceptually, we use the most recent typology of mechanisms of policy diffusion. Methodologically, we use precise and partly original measures for five distinct diffusion mechanisms and apply event history regression models across a maximum of 169 countries from 1980 to 2020. Our findings show that the adoption of both STCPs and SCOPs is strongly shaped by three diffusion mechanisms: policy externalities via neighboring destination countries, policy expertise via joint membership in Transnational Epistemic Communities, and by hierarchy and conditionality exerted by the European Union. By contrast, policy externalities that are based on the fact that countries are faced with asylum seekers from the same countries of origin and ideological contagion by like-minded head of governments do not constitute robust predictors of either STCP or SCOP adoption.