This article reviews the field of citizenship studies, with attention to the causes and consequences of policy. It summarizes key findings and points of consensus across three research domains: the determinants of citizenship policy, the consequences of citizenship policy, and the consequences of citizenship, i.e., the utility of obtaining citizenship for immigrant integration. After identifying strengths and weaknesses of each, I propose new directions in research that widen the field in terms of cases and generalizable theory while also deepening the field through serious attention to approaches that center the immigrant experience.

This article examines the ‘policy networks’ that existed between 1997 and 2007 in UK asylum, economic migration and immigrant integration policy. The analysis shows that employers and businesses (together with other state and non-state actors) were part of a tightly organised, ideologically cohesive economic migration ‘policy community’. This policy community was crucial to the development of economic migration policy, in contrast to the development of asylum and integration policies. The central argument of this article is that the mainstream interpretation of UK immigration policy change (that change was driven by an elite-led, powerful executive) is correct in tracing the dynamics of asylum policy development between 1997 and 2007 under New Labour, but wrong for the development of immigration policy as a whole, which was more complex, and where businesses played a key role.

How do citizens define their civic obligation when their country faces a democratic threat? Do citizens of a democracy think it is important to uphold liberal democratic values or to participate in governance? Do they embrace values that protect democracy, or do they just protect their political party or “side”? I examine changes to citizenship norms in the context of democratic threat using observational data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. I compare trends between 2004 and 2019, which show a weakening in the consensus of “good citizen” norms. Specifically, partisans on the left are more likely to value diversity, vigilance, and tolerance; while partisans on the right become more supportive of values like obeying the law. These differences are reduced in consensus-based political systems, but still the consequences are concerning: when the ties of citizenship norms become weaker, so too does national unity, which is integral to democratic legitimacy and stability.

What does it mean to be a ‘good American’? Immigrants to the United States have obtained civic knowledge in a variety of ways, including federal textbooks and independent learning, and in different contexts over time, from employer-organised classes to handbooks written by civil society groups. This paper analyses citizenship manuals from one such group–the Daughters of the American Revolution (‘D.A.R.’)–to trace continuities and changes in definitions of American citizenship over the twentieth century. This paper is the first to make use of these manual archives, which contain over 30 different citizenship manuals, printed between 1921 and 1996. To compare and analyse the corpus of manuals, the paper employs both computer-assisted content analysis through topic modelling and textual interpretation. This approach provides rich descriptive evidence of how American citizenship norms change over a century, the influence of scarcity and war on that identity, as well as the changing role for organisations like the D.A.R. in the civic education of immigrants.

Politicians and media frequently invoke immigration threats to shape public opinion. But how do outgroup threat frames affect norms of citizenship, including behavior, liberal value commitments, and national belonging? This paper presents evidence from an embedded vignette survey experiment in three immigrant-receiving societies: United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. I find immigration threats are filtered through partisanship in polarized settings, and asymmetrically affect norms of “good citizenship” among individuals on the partisan left. However, we see variation within this group: Democrats (US) de-value norms of behavior, like voting and being informed, while Labor supports (UK) repudiate liberal norms like tolerance and rally around national belonging. By contrast, in Germany, we observe more consensus in citizenship norm responses. The strong effect of immigration threat framing on the partisan left brings our attention to the strategic use of immigration discourse to move traditionally sympathetic citizens away from democratic civic ideals.

Immigrant‐related policy indexes have become popular in both U.S. and European contexts, yet these projects boast distinct and divergent trajectories. European indices are characterized by rigorous conceptualization, specificity in elements of policy design (e.g., settings like fees or appeal process), and a variety of measurement strategies. By contrast, U.S. state‐level policy indices exhibit a lack of differentiation between immigration and integration policy and excessive generality in measurement and representation of policy instruments and settings, exacerbated in presenting a policy index as an aggregate count. This paper argues U.S. policy indexing can benefit from the European indexing experience. Following an overview of the state of each field, assessing concept differentiation, specification, and measurement in each, the paper illustrates how even the well‐conceived and specified European integration policy indices run into problems at the analysis stage. It presents a replication‐replacement study to illustrate divergent performance of highly correlated and conceptually agreeing indices, as well as methodological issues inherent to indices of low‐N, including using a policy index as a dependent variable and index selection absenta prioritheorization. It concludes with suggestions for improving American immigration policy indices, as well as general observations on working with statistical power‐challenged indices and data limitations.