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measuring immigration policies: the IMPIC database

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Abstract

Despite a growing interest in migration questions, it is still not possible to systematically analyse immigration policies across time and a large number of countries. Most studies in this field have heretofore focussed on individual cases. Recently, there have been a series of studies that have proposed policy indices that allow for large-N analyses. It appears, however, that these studies have not always adequately addressed the main challenges of index building, that is, conceptualisation, measurement and aggregation. Moreover, they are for the most part limited to individual policy fields or there is a trade-off between the number of countries and years that are covered. The aim of this article is to present the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project, which proposes a new and comprehensive way to measure immigration regulations. The data set covers all major fields and dimensions of immigration policies for thirty-three OECD countries between 1980 and 2010. This article discusses the way immigration policies have been conceptualised, how policies have been measured and aggregated and demonstrates the potential of such a new data set.

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Notes

  1. For further details of the project, publications and to access the data set visit the following webpage: www.impic-project.eu

  2. It was initially planned to include all thirty-four OECD countries in the database, but Slovenia was dropped because of problems of finding a country expert (see section below on coders).

  3. These questions are also discussed in Helbling et al (2013) and Bjerre et al (2015).

  4. Of course many more items could have been included than the ones we selected. Given our limited resources we, however, tried to select only the most relevant ones.

  5. Of course, this does not mean that the refugee could not qualify as a labour migrant in the same country, thus still be able to immigrate. For the asylum and refugee policy field, however, the country would be highly restrictive.

  6. National currencies are converted into international dollars using purchasing power parity exchange rates.

  7. This happened in Denmark were requirements were altered from 6 to 24 months between 2007 and 2008.

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Acknowledgements

First of all, the authors would like to thank all country and field experts who helped them with the conceptualisation of the data set and especially the collection of the data. Without their professional help this project would not have been possible. The authors also would like to thank all commentators at various conferences where they presented their project. The authors were especially grateful for the comments they received at various steps of this project from their colleagues at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and from international colleagues at the conference on ‘Causes and Consequences of Immigration and Citizenship Policies’ that they organised in Berlin in June 2014. Finally, the authors would like to thank Jonas Kahle, Andrea Pürckhauer, Hannah Schilling, Anne Bohm, Florian Eyert, Maren Hahnen, Dorina Kalkum, Gregory Kerr and Jakob Oxenius for their research assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bamberg, Kapuzinerstraße 16, Bamberg, 96047, Germany

    marc helbling

  2. WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Reichpietschufer 50, Berlin, 10785, Germany

    marc helbling, liv bjerre & friederike römer

  3. Europa University Viadrina, Große Scharrnstraße 59, Frankfurt (Oder), 15230, Germany

    malisa zobel

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helbling, m., bjerre, l., römer, f. et al. measuring immigration policies: the IMPIC database. Eur Polit Sci 16, 79–98 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2016.4

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