"Foreigners or citizens? Citizenship policies in the countries of the EU"

This paper seeks to integrate the study of citizenship into the main theoretical and substantive debates within the field of comparative politics, by means of an empirical study about how and why citizenship policies vary across the countries of the European Union. The paper discusses four distinct theoretical approaches to citizenship, and the presents systemic empirical evidence from the fifteen EU countries, in order to assess the predictive accuracy of each of the theories. It argues that a historical institutionalist approach seems to provide the best explanation for the national distinctiveness that remains, while also accounting for some of the partial change that has taken place in several countries