To exclude or not to exclude: Citizenship policies in newly independent states.

As much as any decision made by the government of a newly independent state, the choice of the requirements for citizenship influences the lives of the residents in the state and, potentially, relations between the state and those around it. This project seeks to explain variation in the inclusiveness of citizenship policies in newly independent states, focusing in particular on Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and an example of an earlier newly independent state: post-colonial Malaya and Malaysia. The dissertation addresses a weakness in the literature on the explanation of the outcomes of decisions about policies such as citizenship, especially the lack of emphasis on external factors. The central question of the project is: what factors lead the government of a newly independent state to adopt a more inclusive or more exclusive citizenship policy? Six factors are investigated as explanatory variables: perceptions about the definition of the nation and the state, perceptions about the degree of threat to the nation and the state, the role of ethnic minorities, the actions of an interested neighboring state, the actions of international organizations, and the role of the emigre community. This examination reveals that perceptions about the nation, the state, and threats to both play crucial roles in the inclusiveness of the policy. It also demonstrates important effects of international organizations which have driven otherwise exclusive policies in a more inclusive direction. The evidence from this project does not support, however, a significant direct effect of a large, neighboring state interested in the citizenship decision. Rather, the neighboring state is only effective when working through international organizations.Ph.D.Political ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104740/1/9610073.pdfDescription of 9610073.pdf : Restricted to UM users only