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Antje Ellermann
Professor
Research Classification
Research Interests
Migrations, Populations, Cultural Exchanges
Migratory Flows
Public Policies
Identity and Transnationality
Role of Governments and Institutions
Comparative Public Policy
Migration and Citizenship
Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs
Affiliations to Research Centres, Institutes & Clusters
Research Options
I am interested in and conduct interdisciplinary research.
Research Methodology
Qualitative Research
Graduate Student Supervision
Doctoral Student Supervision
Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
Discrimination in post-World War II naturalization policy : France and Switzerland (2023)
With the rise of anti-immigrant populist parties and anti-immigration mobilization across Western states, the topic of discrimination in liberal democracies’ membership regimes has received renewed interest. With a focus on two understudied policies that constitute the cornerstones of France’s and Switzerland’s contemporary nationality regimes (the French Nationality Code of 1945, which is still in force today, and the Law on the Acquisition and Loss of Swiss Nationality of 1952, which was repealed in 2018), my dissertation investigates patterns of discrimination in liberal democracies’ naturalization policies after World War II and policy makers’ motivations for naturalization policy change. Through a discourse analysis of hundreds of archival documents, my research reveals the central role of group-based exclusion in the postwar naturalization policies of France and Switzerland. Both policies maintained and introduced discriminatory naturalization requirements on the basis of ascriptive characteristics (gender in both countries, and country of origin and health status in France). The two pieces of legislation also provided for the granting of differential rights to citizens based on gender (in both countries) and one’s mode of nationality acquisition (in France). Furthermore, my analysis shows that policy makers’ support for principles usually associated with political liberalism (i.e., universalism, state neutrality, and equality before the law) only played a small role, if any, in the development and adoption of new naturalization policies after World War II. In France, the adoption of new naturalization provisions was driven by post-Vichy society’s pressing need to respond to the country’s demographic and economic challenges after the war, as well as by concerns about national identity. In Switzerland, the adoption of stricter naturalization requirements resulted from policy makers’ desire to strengthen national identity and from the associated instrumentalization of alarmist discourses about “foreign overpopulation.” My dissertation contributes to the literature on the persistence of group bias in rules of nationality acquisition by deepening our understanding of the role that discrimination has historically played in the development and consolidation of liberal citizenship. It also highlights the overarching importance of gender when it comes to the differential treatment of applicants to naturalization and citizens.
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Mainstreaming the labour market integration of immigrants in the EU : policy framework and policy impact (2023)
My dissertation examines a recent policy trend in immigrant integration:‘mainstreaming’, an effort to promote equality between immigrants and EU nationals in genericpolicy domains such as education, housing, and employment through strategies that address theneeds of the population at large. Despite its prominence as a policy approach within theEuropean Union, there is little cross-national comparative work on policy mainstreaming. Mydissertation seeks to fill this gap by addressing cross-country variation in the mainstreaming oflabour market support, and its impact on the labour market integration of immigrants. I develop aPolicy Index of Mainstreaming in Labour Market Support that covers data from 2006 to 2016across 25 EU/EEA countries. The MLMS Index is the first of its kind to categorize diversity inmainstreamed employment support policy. It measures the scope of mainstreaming and the levelof access to mainstreamed policies for various groups of immigrants.I argue that due to its focus on equality, policy mainstreaming in labour market supportenhances the convergence between immigrants and EU nationals with reference to employmentoutcomes and it improves, on average, career prospects for immigrants. Under more robust levelsof mainstreaming, the link between immigrant status and labour market performance isreinforced and higher policy exposure is likely to lead to better employment outcomes.I use multilevel Bayesian regression analysis in combination with single-level logisticregression and cross-tabulation analysis to test the policy effects on the employment outcomes ofimmigrants in the EU. Individual-level data are drawn from the European Union Labour ForceSurvey. Country-level data are drawn from my Index of Mainstreaming in Labour MarketSupport, the CIVIX, the OECD and Eurostat.My research allows for an exploration of how mainstreamed labour market integrationpolicies vary over time and place. Next, my work offers new insights into whethermainstreaming is an effective policy strategy. Finally, the dissertation joins a small but growingliterature that uses multilevel regression analysis to test integration policy effects. I considerpolicy context as a community characteristic, which implies that analysis of the impact ofmainstreaming should rely on both individual-level and country-level attributes.
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The influence of higher education on immigration policy in Canada (2021)
The number of international students with a valid study permit in Canada has more than tripled since 1998 to 827,586 in 2019. Once described as a laggard, Canada is now an industry leader in international student recruitment. Federal government investment and policy change in visa processing, temporary work authorizations and immigration pathways for international student graduates have facilitated year over year increases in international student enrolments since the mid-2000s. These changes are in stark contrast to international student immigration policy only twenty years prior but little research exists to explain this major policy shift. The literature that does exist hypothesizes that policy change is prompted by competitive policy diffusion in which Canada considered the policies of other countries to create their own for competitive advantage. I argue this explanation is incomplete and does not account for the internal special interest lobbying taking place by the higher education sector. Through an outcomes-based process tracing approach I establish that higher education institutions and their associations did not respond to government policy change, but instead lobbied government for changes to temporary and permanent immigration. This research provides a detailed within case account of the chronology of policy change using lobbying records, media and document analysis and elite interviews to develop a series of causal process observations. Policy influence or success is then determined using the degree of preference attainment methodology that compares policy preferences of special interests with policy outcomes and contributes to the understanding of interest group theory. The results highlight the cross- jurisdictional and inter-departmental challenges both between the provinces and the federal government and across federal departments. Higher education sector leaders navigated this jurisdictional logjam by looking for government allies and creating a coalition to advance their interests. As increasing numbers of international students graduate with work authorization and an aspiration to immigrate to Canada permanently, there is a question about the evolving role of higher education institutions in the migration pathway in terms of becoming a de facto portal for migration and as a migration hub along the responsibilities that come with it.
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The politics of subsystems: agenda management and policy change in education (2018)
Why is the policy status quo more resilient in some contexts than others? What are the conditions by which policy instruments can be transformed, in lieu of other degrees of change? I argue that the properties of policy design institutions have played an important role in determining the degree of policy change during recent reforms of public education in Germany and France, following from ‘PISA shocks’ in each country. The OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a cross-national comparison of education systems that revealed unexpectedly poor results for Germany in 2001 and France in 2007. The subsequent (and surprising) policy change outcomes can be explained by examining sector-specific policy design institutions (i.e., policy subsystems). It is from analysis of subsystem politics in the education sector that I begin to develop an agenda-management model of policy change. More specifically, I found that the existence in Germany of a stable, consensus-oriented institution for education policy design – what I call a policy oligopoly – was critical for managing the reform agenda and for facilitating a transformation of policy instruments in lieu of greater or lesser forms of change. Furthermore, the existence in France of a conflict-ridden subsystem – an unstable monopoly for policy design – resulted in a disorderly reform episode and eventually the obstruction of many of the proposed policy changes. The research involved a comparative process tracing of educational policy-making in Germany and France, involving 58 participant and expert interviews and an intensive analysis of primary documents and secondary materials. From this evidence, I describe different types of policy change involved in each case, explain the connection between subsystem politics and forms of policy change, and evaluate the plausibility of this agenda-management model when compared to more conventional explanations, such as policy internationalization or partisan-politics. The dissertation makes a number of contributions to the literature on change in public policy. It provides a novel account for how and why certain policy-making regimes facing acute external pressure can significantly change the instrumental logic of policy yet retain aspects of the political and policy status quo, while other regimes fail in this regard.
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Rough Peace: Understanding the Avoidance of Armed Conflict in Bolivia (2016)
Why and how does peace persist in some contentious political contexts, but not others? I argue that certain forms of locally embedded governance institutions can play an important role in mitigating the likelihood of armed violence. Specifically, I find that inclusive communities equipped with governance institutions capable of resolving collective action problems—which I refer to as “Ostromian communities”—are, under a range of conditions, less likely to engage in armed conflict with other communities or the state. The research employs a method of process tracing on the basis of 70 participant and expert interviews, primary document collection and analysis and other archival research in the primary case of contestation over coca eradication in the Chapare region of Bolivia from 1982 until 2004. First, I illustrate how the coca growers’ federations constituted an Ostromian community. Second, I show how the federations’ inclusive political institutions encouraged and enabled high levels of coordinated and contentious non-violent political activity, but stopped short of armed resistance. This outcome resulted despite a repressive state presence in the region and regular instances of violence directed against the community occurring over a period of more than two decades. The dissertation makes several contributions to the civil conflict literature. It provides a novel explanation for why and how some countries at risk of civil conflict—such as those with unconsolidated political regimes or limited state capacities—tend to persist indefinitely in a state of rough, yet durable peace, while others experience conflict.
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Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
Climate change and the shifting cost-benefit calculus of economic development in the Russian Far East and High Arctic (2024)
Russia’s northern geography is being transformed by climate change. Concurrently, the Russianstate is investing significant resources in its northern lands and is encouraging a large migration topopulate its Far East and High Arctic for the purposes of settlement and development. While theRussian state has historically championed land use as a crucial aspect of the country’s economy,geopolitical power, and national security, little scholarship has attempted to analyze how theRussian state’s interests in its northern regions are changing as climate change alters key featuresof this territory. This paper posits that cost-benefit analysis (CBA) offers a useful approach throughwhich to understand the state’s shifting relationship to its northern regions. The paper argues thatclimate change is altering the cost-benefit calculus of economic development in the Russian FarEast and High Arctic, where it is increasing benefits and reducing costs for the state. This approachhas explanatory power both in regards to the Russian state’s historical relationship with theseregions as well as the state’s re-engagement with these spaces in recent years.
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Populist memory politics and partisan immigration agendas in contemporary Germany (2024)
While both research on rising European anti-immigration parties and memory politics have vastly expanded in the last decades, the connection between the two has been widely neglected. To bridge this gap, this thesis studies the relationship between historic narratives and society's advocated boundaries by populist right-wing parties (PRPs). Utilizing the concepts of memory politics and Schinkel's conceptualization of imagined societies, this thesis analyzes the 2021 party manifesto of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD). The analysis is structured by the following three questions: 1) Is German society portrayed as a historical one? 2) What historic moments are chosen as crucial for defining such a historic society? 3) How does the party's historic society narrative relate to its immigration agenda? Through a both inductive and deductive critical discourse analysis of the 2021 party manifesto, it argues that the AfD's anti-immigration position builds on the party's professed duty to protect German historic society by protecting the country's cultural and geographical boundaries. In the second part, this thesis explores the usefulness of the framework when applied to parties beyond the far-right political spectrum. Given the scope of the thesis, it chooses the left-wing populist party DIE LINKE. The findings indicate that the left-wing party shows a different challenge than the right: Namely, an ideological approach to German historical identity and immigration, lacking a true acknowledgement of immigrant history in Germany.
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'Emigrant-unfriendly states': explaining why India has a low emigration rate (2022)
What explains India’s low emigration rate despite it being one of the world’s largest migrant-sending states? This thesis argues that existing scholarship has overlooked the actions of sending states when it comes to migration control and as a result, has missed the construction of what I term as ‘emigrant-unfriendly’ states, particularly among liberal democracies. Despite being the leading country of origin for international migrants, India has a strikingly low emigration rate compared to its neighbours in South Asia and other developing democracies with large populations. In this thesis, I argue that the low rate is the result of restrictive policy. Focusing on economically driven emigration, I hypothesize that the key variable that best explains the path of restrictive emigration policy in India is the post-independence adoption of Nehru’s anti-imperial and regulatory foreign policies that differentiated between emigrants of varying skill levels. To test this argument, I employ process-tracing to determine whether India’s post-independence institutions continue to play a role in restricting emigration from India. I look at three empirical cases as critical junctures for India’s emigration history, namely, the policy making period in 1947 immediately after independence, the Oil Boom in the 1970s, and the Tech Boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. I test my hypothesis against an alternative hypothesis which is that India’s low emigration rate can be explained by government actors restricting emigration due to its negative domestic economic implications. This thesis concludes that policy decisions made and institutions established at the time of India’s independence have persisted and continue to hinder pro-emigration policy reform, resulting in India having one of the lowest emigration rates of any developing state in the world today.
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Beyond a Politics of Integration: tactical cosmopolitanism among Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles (2022)
Western liberal democracies have experienced increased political anxieties vis-à-vis migration, with a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment due to perceptions of immigrants threatening national identity and norms (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014). States promote migrant integration, encouraging immigrants to become more “embedded” in their host society’s cultural, social, economic, and political structures, as a diversity management response (Valtonen, 2016). However, recent scholarship has begun to criticize the very notion of ‘immigrant integration’ for upholding neocolonial power, maintaining purified notions of class and of race, implicitly characterizing immigrants as ‘objects of problematization’, and creating images of society that demarcate ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (Schinkel, 2017). On a pragmatic level, policies under the integration umbrella have been argued to fail to address the nature of ‘superdiversity,’ which encompasses an increased number of new, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants. Thus, we are presented with a tension between the necessary normative criticisms of the idea of integration, the limited analytical utility of integration in a superdiverse society, and the tangible and often material benefits of integration. How can we reconceptualize the politics of integration in an era of super-diversity? I argue that by placing an emphasis on entering the ‘mainstream,’ scholars miss an important dimension of immigrant social mobility that involves not ‘bridging’ into the mainstream, but instead participating in a host society through ways that transcend a national demarcation. Through an assessment of Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles, I demonstrate how Landau and Freemantle’s concept of ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’ serves as a reconciliation between these divides on the benefits of integration and its necessary criticisms. Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles choose not to mainstream their identity with a host society. Rather, they practice social mobility in ways that do not constitute traditional bridging—demonstrated by tactical cosmopolitanism—while nonetheless reaping the benefits of ‘integration.’
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Secularism or nationalism? partisan differences in Quebec's Bill 21 debate (2022)
In 2018, the government of the province of Québec put forward and passed Bill 21, An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State, which proposed, among other measures, to ban public servants from wearing religious symbols at work. While ostensibly seeking to further secularism in the province, an analysis of the legislative debates makes it clear that the main question at issue was one of nationalism rather than secularism. Further, parties’ voting patterns were not split according to the more classic Québec party divisions of left-right economic positioning and stance on separatism. This thesis puts forward an analysis of the legislative debates surrounding Bill 21, using qualitative coding and textual analysis to determine party priorities in presenting opposition or support for the bill to the public in a highly mediatized debate.While each party puts forward a distinct narrative of what it means to belong in the Québec nation in these debates, party positioning on Bill 21 can be explained by speakers’ positioning on a plural-monist axis related to questions of nationalism, intersecting with normative ideals of how restrictive or inclusive the idea of the nation should be. This finding has interesting implications for the study of integration measures in other subnational states—notably, that understandings of nationhood, and who should be included in it, may prove more influential in shaping integration policy than other traditional party markers, such as economic left-right positioning or positioning on questions of separatism.
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Photographic frames of immigration in a polarized media environment (2021)
Based on the political communication and public opinion on immigration literatures, this paper develops and tests hypotheses for the visual news coverage of 2019 migration crisis at the Mexico-United States border. The news websites used here, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, the Washington Times and Breitbart News, span a polarized ideological spectrum. The way they use photography to frame the immigration crisis and immigrants should be consistent with their respective political biases and those of their audiences. Looking at 987 images used by these outlets for two months, the findings presented here are largely consistent with the expectations of the referenced literatures. The more conservative a news sources, the likelier it is to visually link immigration to criminality and to portray immigrants as criminals and mostly males. The more liberal the source, the more it will depict the situation at the border as a humanitarian one or link it to the economic benefits of immigration. It will also portray immigrants as family members and show more mobilization against government policies. Looking at the visual coverage of immigration during that period also allows us to uncover two specific editorial practices driving polarization. First, more radical sources tend to make a rhetorical use of images at the expense of a more strictly informational approach. Second, Breitbart displays systematically stronger frames and exploits the images’ potential for implicit messaging to advance more radical positions than the Huffington Post, which implies that polarization might be skewed to the right, at least in the case of media discourses on immigration.
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Diversity and inequality? An analysis of multicultural policies and immigrant economic integration in Europe (2019)
Best practices regarding methods of immigrant integration remain inconclusive within the literature. Previous research has come to divergent conclusions regarding the role of multiculturalist policies on different types of integration; multiculturalism has been linked with increased sociopolitical integration, while other scholarship deemed multiculturalism detrimental to socioeconomic outcomes. None of this literature, however, examines the effects of these policies on strictly economic concerns and most are restricted to the comparative analysis of a small number of cases. This study attempts to fill this empirical gap by examining the relationship between multicultural policies and economic integration — specifically, are multicultural policies (as opposed to assimilation) effective or detrimental to the economic integration of immigrants in Western Europe? Further, this study seeks to determine the role of multicultural policies on immigrants from non-Western countries of origin, given multiculturalism’s commitment to affirming the cultural difference of immigrants and minorities. Do multicultural policies have a stronger positive effect on immigrants from non-Western countries as opposed to immigrants from within Europe or North America? Drawing on rounds 1 to 6 of the European Social Survey and the Multicultural Policy Index, this study uses regression analysis to assess economic integration outcomes over a ten-year period in 16 European countries. It operationalizes economic integration through dependent variables such as income decile, occupational status, and employment status. It finds that multiculturalism is associated with increases in economic integration. Furthermore, when immigrants are examined heterogeneously based on cultural difference, the results suggest multicultural policies have greater effects on those who display higher levels of cultural difference; namely, non-Western immigrants. Moreover, the multicultural policies of accommodation such as affirmative action and dress code exemptions are found to be linked with more pronounced economic integration outcomes for non-Western immigrants.
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To Reform or Not to Reform: China's Hukou Reform at the Local Level (2016)
The Chinese government has issued a series of directives of hukou system reform. However, the strength and depth of the hukou reforms at the local level differ greatly across localities. Some local governments refused to reform, while others implemented local reforms either radically or conservatively. Among those that reformed local system, some decided to suspend or alter it and others continued. Thus, the paper asks what accounts for the variance of hukou system reforms across localities. Specifically, the research question is two-fold: 1) regarding the initiation of reforms, why some local governments implemented radical hukou reform, others partially reformed their hukou policies, and still others did not carry out the reform, and 2) as for the maintenance of reform, why, among those that pursued hukou reform, some decided to suspend or alter it while others continued. The paper adopts the comparative case study method and delves into three cases: Zhengzhou, Hohhot, and Fenghua. Different from existing literature that focuses merely on either incentives or disincentives of local hukou reform, this paper brings the political factors in and argues that it is local leaders’ political decisions based on different degrees of pressure of urbanization from upper level governments and different levels of policy adjustability to costs that cause such divergence. What’s more, I contend that the variance of the adjustability to expected costs leads to different outcomes in maintaining hukou reforms.
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Crossnational Divergence in Post-OPEC Embargo Energy Policy: Foreign Policy Capacity in Germany and the United States (2012)
This thesis explains the origins of the differing domestic energy policy regimes in the United States and Germany. Using historical process tracing, the author argues that policy diverged following the 1973-74 Energy embargo. This crisis allowed space for considerable policy innovation in the two nations, but Germany was able to carry out far more extensive domestic reforms. The author argues Germany had a much greater incentive to pursue these often costly policies thanks to its limited foreign policy capacities. This hypothesis is tested using a methodology derived from Alexander George and Andrew Bennett’s work on case studies and a theoretical model based on Terry Karl and Paul Pierson’s analysis of critical junctures and path dependence. The United States, by contrast, was able to execute a solution based on securing external supplies. The thesis concludes by exploring the implications for contemporary energy policy.
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