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In recent decades, European governments have faced persistent pressures to manage the effects of mass immigration on their societies. As a result, citizenship policies have received increasing amounts of attention from both policymakers and scholars alike. However, to date, it remains unclear how these policies regulating political membership have changed over time, and whether these policies have converged or diverged in their requirements for membership. To answer these questions, this article advances a new theoretical and empirical expansion of existing scholarship on citizenship. With data collected from national citizenship policies across 16 Western European countries from 1970 to 2017, I construct a two-dimensional framework of citizenship acquisition requirements in order to test a number of extant hypotheses regarding citizenship policy trends over the last five decades. Through an examination of aggregated country-year scores and correlation analysis, I find that concurrent trends of both convergence and divergence are occurring in Western Europe over time and that most states have largely abandoned their traditional approaches to citizenship and immigrant incorporation as they adapt more open yet more regulated strategies to address the contemporary realities of immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tries to explain regional level variation in the far right-wing vote across more than 160 regions in 17 Western European countries from 1990 to 2013. With the help of a panel Tobit model, I first examine the impact of nine regional-level structural indicators on the dependent variable, the percentage of the far right-wing vote. I find that the far right performs better in territorial units with a high percentage of university-educated individuals, in rural regions and in areas that have a high percentage of foreigners. Second, I use a dynamic specification in first differences to evaluate how changes in the independent variables trigger changes in the dependent variable. The results of this second specification highlight that increases in unemployment rates and in the number of college-educated citizens trigger a better performance of the far right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fall of the communist regimes in central and eastern Europe was a shattering event for the western European radical left, causing many parties to change their names and strategies. Despite prophesies pointing to the death of radical anti-capitalist politics, radical left parties (RLPs) still exist in all parts of Europe, and in many countries they have even been able to increase their influence. This paper seeks to provide a comparative mapping of the policies and policy positions of western European RLPs before and after the fall of communism. The results of the examination indicate that although leftward trends can be observed in many RLPs in the early 2010s, the general, long-time, trend shows that the radical left family – and especially democratic socialist parties – has become less radical with regards to the core left–right dimension. Moreover, the study also shows that many RLPs – and, again, especially democratic socialist parties – have become more interested in other, non-socioeconomic, issues. Despite the rise of new left issues, the radical left is, however, still distinguishable from other parties mainly through their comparatively strong emphasis on old, traditional, left issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]