Conceptualizing and Measuring Citizenship and Integration Policy: Past Lessons and New Approaches

Research on immigration and citizenship has become one of the fastest growing areas in political science, with one trend being the boon of comparative citizenship and immigration policy indices. This article discusses methodological concerns with this enterprise. The first half addresses issues with policy indices, including (a) concept validity and boundary maintenance and (b) measurement, compensability, and aggregate index use. The second half examines why these problems matter in hypothesis testing and for inference by replicating three policy index–using studies, rerunning analyses with different indices to test consistency of findings. These tests underscore a central finding: What scholars know about the effects of immigration and citizenship policy is subject to data and sample selection. The article concludes with a number of recommendations and strategies for moving forward. These approaches will not only strengthen this growing research agenda but also mainstream migrant-related policy studies into larger literatures in comparative politics.