Samuel David Schmid

University of Lucerne · Department of Political Science

Due to a lack of data, quantitative analysis of integration policy trends during the past decade has received limited attention. This research note presents newly collected data from the Migrant Integration Policy Index, which includes information on several different policy areas related to migrant integration in 36 EU and OECD countries between 2...

With the help of the Immigrant Inclusion Index (IMIX), a quantitative tool for measuring the electoral inclusion of immigrants, we demonstrate that European democracies are much more exclusive than they should be. All normative theories of democracy share the conviction that it is imperative that democracies include long-term immigrant residents in...

This article starts from the premise that those who debate and study the expansion of demoi/electorates – from practitioners to empirical scholars and normative theorists – should consider more seriously that migrants are always immigrants and emigrants at the same time. Doing so implies, first, that states can regulate their electorates through fo...

Thanks to the work undertaken by different research teams (GLOBALCIT, MACIMIDE, MIPEX…), data on citizenship policies are becoming available on a wide range of countries worldwide. The collection of these data makes it possible to develop new comparative research frameworks that go beyond the dominant European/Western-centred perspective that we fi...

In this article, I present the second version of the Citizenship Regime Inclusiveness Index (CITRIX 2.0). It measures the inclusiveness of regulations for immigrants’ access to citizenship across 23 OECD countries from 1980 to 2019, zooming in on four essential policy components: conditions regarding (1) birthright; (2) residence; (3) renunciation;...

In this article, I introduce a typology that maps the regulation of two fundamental boundaries of modern nation-states regarding immigration: territorial boundaries and membership boundaries. Based on a theory of the structural logics underlying Immigration Regime Openness (IRO) and Citizenship Regime Inclusiveness (CRI), I make four observations o...

Elaborating a popular assumption about the effects of immigration policies on the integration of migrants, we argue in this article that more restrictive immigration policies lead to the selection of immigrants with greater integration potential, and that this selection should foster migrant integration. To test this argument, we combine country-le...

Conditions for Electoral Rights data include information on conditions for eligibility and access to voting and candidacy rights in the 28 EU Member States, Switzerland, 20 American countries, Australia and New Zealand based on electoral laws in 2015, 2017, and 2019. The dataset also includes the information for 2013 in the 28 EU Member States. The...

The electoral franchise has become more universal as restrictions based on criteria such as sex or property have been lifted throughout the process of democratisation. Yet, a broad range of exclusions has persisted to this date, making the suffrage non-universal, even in established democracies. In this article, we present ELECLAW, a new set of ind...

While universal suffrage is widely considered an almost universal democratic norm, several and sometimes severe forms of disenfranchisement have persisted to this date, including in highly consolidated democracies. The ensuing ‘problem of inclusion’ diagnosed by Robert Dahl has been overlooked in the most prominent indices measuring the quality of...

Electoral laws determine membership in the demos, that is, in the set of people who can participate in elections and referenda via voting and candidacy rights. As such, they are of crucial importance for democratic inclusion and electoral democracy. Based on information of the qualitative database on electoral rights, the ELECLAW indicators measure...

The EUDO CITIZENSHIP Conditions for Electoral Rights 2015 (CER 2015) includes information on the conditions and procedures of access to the franchise in the 28 EU Member States and in 20 American countries, in 13 types of elections and for 3 categories of persons: citizen residents, non-citizen residents, and non-resident citizens. The database is...

With the help of the Immigrant Inclusion Index (IMIX), a quantitative tool for measuring the electoral inclusion of immigrants, we demonstrate that European democracies are much more exclusive than they should be. All normative theories of democracy share the conviction that it is imperative that democracies include long-term immigrant residents in...

Research on the “migration - development nexus” often highlights the positive impact of migration on various aspects of human development. From this perspective, increasing openness to immigrant workers in high-income countries constitutes a crucial policy goal. However, next to concerns about negative consequences such as the “brain drain” in send...

Today democratic nation-states are populated not only by sedentary natives, but also by immigrants. To retain full legitimacy, it is imperative that democracies include long-term immigrant residents into the demos, so that all those who are subjected to national laws can take part in creating them. Treating this consensus in democratic theory as a...

Previous research has uncovered certain trade-offs (i.e. negative correlations) between the openness toward labor immigration and the rights afforded to immigrant workers across labor immigration programs. In particular, Martin Ruhs (2013) has argued that there is a “price of rights” – that is, that expanding certain rights, especially social righ...

This paper aims to contribute to the new wave of democracy measurement that we have experienced during the last years. We show that the new democracy measurement tools represent major steps forwards in aligning methodology to theory and practice. Nevertheless, we argue that in respect to the fundamental dimension of inclusion there is still a gap b...

No. 64 of the Political Concepts Committee on Concepts and Methods Working Paper Series. (with Andrea Blättler and Samuel D. Schmid).

Abstract Today democratic nation-states are confronted with populations that consist not only of seden-tary residents, but also of immigrants. For these democracies to retain full legitimacy, it is imperative that long-term immigrant residents are also included into the demos, so that all those who are subjected to national laws can take part in cr...

In this paper we develop the nucleus of a quantitative tool for the comparative assessment of democracies with respect to the electoral inclusion of immigrants. We take into account the standards of concept formation and at the same time we stick firmly to our evaluative goal. Therefore, we start by justifying why and when democracies ought to elec...

In this paper, we diagnose a conceptual deficit in established measurement tools for comparing and assessing democracies. Even though the dimension of inclusion has been central to traditional formulations in the conceptu-alization of democracy, many measurement instruments (continue to) disregard or underplay the importance of the political inclus...