Traditionally, in many states dual citizenship was perceived negatively and such states provided accordingly in their national legislation that citizenship is lost automatically upon the voluntary acquisition of another citizenship. More recently, however, we see that the majority of states has recognized both the importance of keeping the link with the emigrant community alive, as well as the difficulties of counteracting dual citizenship in a world of mobility and mixed marriages. Yet, whereas there is thus a clear global trend towards accepting dual citizenship, we still observe significant variation across countries and continents. This paper aims to analyse this variation, using a new dataset on dual citizenship policies in nearly all states of the world since 1960. We explore the empirical relevance of political, economic and demographic factors in a cross-section time-series analysis with the acceptance of dual citizenship as binary dependent variable.
