Trends in Citizenship Policies of the 15 Former Soviet Union Republics: Conforming the World Culture or Following National Identity?

The following paper examines the nature and change in citizenship policies in the former 15 Soviet republics since the collapse of the USSR till 2005. The main focus of the paper is the requirements that former Soviet republics adopted into their citizenship laws as prerequisites for naturalization, and the trend in changes made to these provisions. The paper proposes a theory that combines Neo-institutionalism, particularly isomorphism of nation-state models and policies (Meyer et al), with the national identity conceptions of citizenship (Brubaker 1992) to explain trends and shifts in citizenship policies of newly independent nation-states of the former USSR upon entering the world society and later advancing in their nationhood and statehood. Paper provides preliminary descriptive analysis of trends in requirements that are set for citizenship acquisition, as well as identifies a possible methodology for testing the proposed theory in future research. Dataset used in this paper has been constructed by coding citizenship laws (and amendments) of 15 former Soviet states into dummy and continuous variables.