title: Naturalization fosters the long-term political integration of immigrants.
abstract: Does naturalization cause better political integration of immigrants into the host society? Despite heated debates about citizenship policy, there exists almost no evidence that isolates the independent effect of naturalization from the nonrandom selection into naturalization. We provide new evidence from a natural experiment in Switzerland, where some municipalities used referendums as the mechanism to decide naturalization requests. Balance checks suggest that for close naturalization referendums, which are decided by just a few votes, the naturalization decision is as good as random, so that narrowly rejected and narrowly approved immigrant applicants are similar on all confounding characteristics. This allows us to remove selection effects and obtain unbiased estimates of the long-term impacts of citizenship. Our study shows that for the immigrants who faced close referendums, naturalization considerably improved their political integration, including increases in formal political participation, political knowledge, and political efficacy.
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6044; Immigration and Integration Policy Lab, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6044; Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6044;
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hainmueller
authors.affiliation: Department of Methodology, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom; Institute of Political Science, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland; Migration Policy Lab, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland; d.hangartner@lse.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Dominik
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hangartner
authors.affiliation: Institute of Political Science, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland; Migration Policy Lab, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland; Graduate School of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, 68159 Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Pietrantuono
mesh_terms: D054242:Emigrants and Immigrants; D004641:Emigration and Immigration / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012919:Social Behavior; D013557:Switzerland
keywords: citizenship; immigration; integration; natural experiment; naturalization