Citizenship and the Democratic Pendulum in Post-Communist Europe

Description

Scholarship has long examined the construction of membership in democratic societies, associating open and expansive citizenship with democracy, inclusion and pluralism. Far less academic energy has been dedicated to the trajectories of citizenship policies in countries which have become the site of growing illiberalism and democratic decline. Do citizenship acquisition and loss policies become more open as political regimes democratize? And, do citizenship policies become more restrictive as political regimes turn less democratic or outright authoritarian? Using an original dataset (1990-2021), we focus on two types of groups: desired outsiders, non-residents who benefit from citizenship policies, and undesired outsiders, residents who seek to naturalise. First, we find that there is limited change to citizenship policies for both types of groups during both democratic upswings and downswings. Second, and contrary to our expectations, we find that when democratic upswings, citizenship regimes may become, in fact, more restrictive. Conversely, we find some evidence that citizenship regimes become more open during democratic downswings. We provide the first evidence that citizenship regimes can be both resilient to democratic change in either direction, on the one hand, and can change in unexpected and counter-intuitive ways, on the other hand.

Period	28 Apr 2025
Held at	Democracy Institute