How do officials shape your citizenship application?
How do Dutch and German street-level bureaucrats put naturalisation law into practice? Researcher Hannah Bliersbach hopes to gain more insight into the gap between written regulations and their implementation.
Between 2007 and 2017, at least 75% of Turkish nationals who were naturalised in the German city of Hagen kept their original passport. About 90 kilometres away in the city of Mönchengladbach, no more than 12% did. A new Leiden study asks why the same law can play out so differently, by looking not at the law itself, but at the officials who apply it.
‘Knowing how laws are put into practice is essential if we want to make sure they are fair and equitable’, says Hannah Bliersbach, postdoctoral researcher at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society (Leiden University). ‘A law can only be as fair as its implementation.’
Interviews
The study – funded by the B.A. Schim van der Loeff Fund, a named fund at the Leiden University Fund – will compare the experiences of bureaucrats in Germany and the Netherlands. In Germany, Bliersbach will analyse interviews with German naturalisation officers which were previously conducted by Lisa Mende and Christina Zuber at the University of Konstanz for their research on administrative inequality. The reuse of qualitative data is still quite uncommon, but Bliersbach is excited to honour her colleagues’ generosity by building on their work. In the Netherlands, she hopes to get in touch with officials working at the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) and interview them.
Salient choices
The timing and choice of countries are salient. In Germany, several states have recently seen elections won by far-right parties rallying for much stricter immigration and naturalisation policies. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the previous government proposed extending the residency requirement for citizenship from five to ten years, prompting the IND to examine internally what that would mean for the organisation and its staff.
Comparing Germany and the Netherlands also means comparing two different bureaucratic systems, which could provide interesting insights. ‘In the Netherlands, an applicant might deal with their municipality, while the final decision is made centrally by the IND, by someone the applicant has never met’, Bliersbach explains. ‘In Germany, that’s usually one and the same official. The person who handles your application is also the person who’s going to sign your naturalisation documents.’
Research relevance
The research findings will be relevant to more than one audience. For policymakers and the IND, they offer a sense of how new rules land on a caseworker’s desk, not just how they read on paper. Bliersbach is equally interested in the people doing this job. ‘These systems are made up of people, and people are not perfect’, she says. ‘It helps to get an idea of how these small parts of the system are trying to make sense of it.’
The project started in September and will initially last 13 months focusing primarily on the German data. During that time, Bliersbach plans to prepare for fieldwork in The Netherlands and to apply for more funding.
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Text: Jan Joost Aten, Leiden University editor