At Home Abroad, and Abroad at Home: Why European States Allow Plural Nationality.

The practice of dual citizenship—that is, individuals holding citizenship in more than one nation-state—presents a puzzle for scholars of citizenship politics: Why have states increasingly tolerated, and in some cases encouraged, dual citizenship when international agreements discourage the practice? In part this may reflect the growing international mobility of people: migrants are choosing to naturalize in their states of residence, while children of immigrants in jus soli states achieve dual nationality upon birth. However, the growth in the number of plural nationals alone does not explain why states have explicitly changed their laws to permit dual citizenship. What explains this changing state practice? Dual citizenship speaks to a theoretical debate among scholars who study the institutions of sovereignty and citizenship. Researchers derive competing implications for state sovereignty from plural nationality: it undermines the cohesion of the nation-state, or it reinforces it. Despite the centrality of this debate to our understanding of sovereignty and citizenship, however, most of the existing research relies upon qualitative research designs that do not permit easy generalization. This paper investigates the growth of dual citizenship over time in twenty-five nation-states. It utilize a time-series cross-section research design to test competing state-level, transnational and international hypotheses offered by researchers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]