A Global Panel Dataset of Dyadic Dual Citizenship Acceptance

Dual citizenship provides access to secure legal status and rights in more than one country for an unprecedented number of migrants and their descendants worldwide. While this double allegiance requires matching legal regulations between two states, existing studies of dual citizenship typically focus on migrant origin or destination perspectives. To explore this phenomenon's dyadic nature, we introduce a procedure that leverages existing monadic data on two distinct types of dual citizenship restrictions: origin country restrictions on the loss of citizenship by citizens naturalizing abroad and destination country restrictions requiring foreigners acquiring citizenship in a country to renounce any other citizenship. We add novel data on dyad-specific regulations in place in nearly 13 thousand country-country-year combinations. This results in a global panel dataset of the regulation of dual citizenship in 1.8 million directed dyad-year observations in place between 201 states back to 1960. An open access replication script allows reproducing and updating the dyadic dataset with new available data. We identify regulatory trends and present estimates of the number and proportion of global migrants affected by changing policy constellations and variation in acceptance across political regimes. We show that migrants are more likely to acquire destination country citizenship and thus achieve democratic representation in constellations where they can maintain a legal link with their origin country.