The gap between citizenship law and policy practice has long been identified: from outright dissonance between legal norms and arbitrary practices to “milder” forms of deviation, as in the spaces opened for interpretation and discretion of the street-level bureaucrats. Moreover, as the field has expanded geographically to non-democratic or less affluent states, there are reasons to believe that the challenges are bigger than we had thought. Yet, the conceptualization of the implementation gap and its many nuances along the continuum is still weak.
We invite original contributions inspired by any of the following questions:
1. What is an implementation gap? What are the normative issues related to it (e.g., is it inherently bad for a polity?)
2. How do we theorize the line between discretion and arbitrariness, and does this theorization travel well across polities with different political structures?
3. What are the challenges to observing and comparing the implementation of citizenship policies across countries? What are the existing measures of implementation, what are their limitations, and how could they be improved?
4. Who implements citizenship policy? Are implementation agencies comparable across countries and levels of government, and how do they impact the width of the implementation gap?
5. What are the lessons from the work on street-level bureaucracies for the study of implementation gaps and which research methods can help us to scale up the observations and compare across countries?
With this workshop (19-20 May 2022), MIGCITPOL aims to produce an original publication, either in the form of a Special Issue or edited volume. By sending an abstract the applicants commit to present original work at the Workshop and reserve it as unpublished work for the aimed publication. The Workshop will allow for intense discussions on all papers, therefore constituting an authors’ workshop.
Deadline for abstracts: 10 December 2021
