Administrative inequality in handling requests for German citizenship

A rich body of literature assesses under which conditions immigrants seek citizenship. By contrast, the naturalization practices of host states—specifically the role played by frontline officials who decide on immigrants’ naturalization requests on the ground—remain severely understudied. Questions of implementation are particularly relevant in Germany where the logic of administrative federalism entitles subnational officials to implement federal policies, including citizenship law. This introduces a possibility for sub-national governments to move federal policy closer towards their own policy preferences during implementation in a context where citizenship is heavily politicized. This paper asks which political and organizational factors determine whether frontline officials move “towards”, “away from” or “against” immigrant clients when handling naturalization requests. We address this question through statistical analysis of variance in naturalization rates, as well as dual citizenship rates for third-country nationals across Germany’s 401 counties and 16 constituent regional units. The paper contributes knowledge about the administrative factors hampering successful naturalization in Germany, now one of the OECD’s largest recipient of immigrants, but lagging behind other OECD countries when it comes to naturalization.