Measuring Responsibility-Sharing: A Dataset of European Migration Governance

International migration creates complex interdependencies between countries as well as externalities of states’ migration policies for other countries. The effective provision of refugee protection and migration control thus requires collective efforts of states. The narrow focus on country-level migration policies has prevented scholars from capturing this complex nature of migration governance. In this article, we argue that migration governance should be understood as an implicit form of responsibility-sharing and make three main contributions. First, we develop a novel conceptual framework of responsibility-sharing based on the type and extent of contributions that states make to the regulation of international migration. Second, based on this framework, we build the European migration governance (EU-MIGOV) dataset measuring the policies of responsibility-sharing in 31 European countries between 1990 and 2020. Third, we map the responsibility-sharing in migration governance across countries and over time to illustrate the value and potential of the new dataset.