Crude and Standardized Rates of Ordinary Naturalization in Swiss Municipalities: New Interactive Maps

Immigrant naturalization in Switzerland is often characterized by a generally restrictive approach yet with substantial variation in policies due to the complex multi-level naturalization procedure: ordinary naturalization is based on a three-level decision (municipality/commune, canton, and confederation) with a wide range of different (restrictive or almost liberal) procedures at the municipality level (Wanner and Piguet 2002), which can lead to different outcomes for the foreigner depending on his/her place of residence, and also citizenship.

At the beginning of this century, discriminatory practices in some communes of central Switzerland have been publicized in the media and highlighted in scholarly research (Hainmueller & Hangartner, 2013). In order to document the differences in municipal practices, standardized naturalization rates were published in 2000 (Piguet and Wanner, 2000) and updated in 2012 (Wanner and Steiner, 2012).

For policymakers and persons in charge of the naturalization at the municipality level, it is important to be able to compare the practices and naturalization rates of their municipality with other neighboring communes, cantons or the whole country. To do so, however, naturalization rates should be comparable, i.e. they should take into account the basic characteristics of the foreign population of the municipality. In particular, a municipality with a large number of young foreigners born in Switzerland will, all other things being equal, have more naturalizations than the neighboring municipality, which is mainly composed of recently arrived migrants.

Therefore, standardized naturalization rates were developed in order to compute the number of naturalizations (in %) for a « standard » population that has a specific structure in terms of age, duration of residence in Switzerland and place of birth. Standardization is justified by the strong influence of those variables on the propensity to be naturalized (Kitagawa 1964; Althauser & Wigler, 1972). So, the rates we computed considered the hypothetical number of naturalizations if every Swiss municipality presents the same demographic structure, which was established in 2000 using the structure of the foreign population at that time (Piguet and Wanner, 2000).

Recently, those publications were updated and rates were made available on a web page at the University of Geneva, available in French, German and Italian.

Visitors of this website can find information on crude and standardized naturalization by population size of municipalities in the period 1992-2017. These numbers are visualized in Figure 1 for the period 2011-2017, which also reflects the impact of standardization over the pattern observed on the naturalization crude rates.

Moreover, web visitors can explore interactive maps with crude and standardized naturalized naturalization by municipalities. Figure 2 below provides data on standardized naturalization rates for the period 2011-17. The pop-up window included for each municipality contains information about the name of the municipality, the rate value, the absolute number of ordinary naturalizations (when there were more than five due to anonymity requirements) and the three main nationalities of individual accessing the Swiss citizenship.

In order to make data available in an appealing way, we mapped the rates using R and the library Leaflet which allows users who not are familiar with JavaScript language to easily create web maps using its core functions (Cheng et al. 2019). The outcome can be saved as an html file that can be embedded in a webpage.

For those who could be interested in learning how to create this sort of interactive maps, and example with the standardized rates for the period 2011-2017 as well as the necessary shapefiles of Switzerland (by communes and cantons) and the annotated R code for creating the maps, can be found here.

Philippe Wanner is a professor for Demography at the University of Geneva and is the Deputy Director and a project leader of the nccr – on the move. Juan Galeano is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institut de Démographie et Socioéconomie at the University of Geneva. Both researchers work for the project Explaining and Interpreting Migration Flows and Stocks.

References:

– Althauser, R. P. & Wigler, M. (1972). Standardization and Component Analysis. Sociological Methods & Research 1(1), 97–135.
– Cheng, J., Karambelkar, B. & Xie, Y. (2019). Leaflet: Create Interactive Web Maps with the JavaScript ‘Leaflet’ Library. R package version 2.0.3.
– Hainmueller, J. & Hangartner, D. (2013). Who gets a Swiss passport? A natural experiment in immigrant discrimination. American political science review, 107(1), 159-187.
– Kitagawa, E. (1964). Standardized Comparisons in Population Research, Demography 1(1), 296-315.
– Piguet E. &Wanner P. (2000). Die Einbürgerungen in der Schweiz. Unterschiede zwischen Nationalitäten, Kantonen und Gemeinden, 1981–1998. Neuchâtel, Office fédéral de la statistique.
– Wanner P. & Piguet E. (2002). The Practice of Naturalization in Switzerland: A Statistical Overview. Population-E, 57(6), 917-925.
– Wanner P. & Steiner I. (2012). Einbürgerungslandschaft Switzerland. Entwicklung 1992-2010. Bern, EKM, 60.