INTRODUCTION

The starting point of any comparative analysis of national policies needs to provide a common methodological framework to measure the issue at hand. Unlike in the realm of economic or social policies – where a variety of concepts already have well-established indicators, measures, and databases – citizenship policy represents a relatively new terrain with few existing measures and data sources. Indeed, only in the last decade have scholars attempted to compare systematically the different citizenship laws and practices of certain advanced industrialized countries, and most have done so without seeking to create an overall index with which to compare countries on aggregate terms.

This chapter provides such an empirical baseline, thus forming the basis for much of the empirical analysis that follows in the subsequent chapters. It starts with a brief summary of existing empirical work on comparative citizenship. Then it develops a new measure, the Citizenship Policy Index (CPI), which builds on my earlier work but also adds more refined and systematic measures. Finally, it presents the CPI results for the EU-15, presenting their scores at two different time periods, the 1980s and 2008. This sets up the analysis that follows in the rest of the book, whereby I attempt to account for both the historical variation displayed in the 1980s and the more recent changes in many countries.