Measuring Immigration Policies: Challenges and Limitations (Grad Student Session)

March 4, 2019
2:00 – 3:30 pm
C.K. Choi, Room 351

Marc Helbling, University of Bamberg
“Measuring Immigration Policies: Challenges and Limitations”

This session is co-sponsored by the UBC Migration Research Excellence Cluster.

Abstract – Over the last two decades in political science an increasing number of policy indices have been created to go beyond single case studies or the comparison of a small number of cases. The aim of this method session is to look at how regulations in a particular policy field can be quantified for large-N analyses, what the potential of such policy indices are and which limitations they face. Using the example of the recently built Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) database challenges regarding conceptualization, measurement and aggregation will be debated. After a short presentations students will get the opportunity to discuss questions regarding their own research or more general questions in the field of policy index building.

Bio – Marc Helbling is a Professor in political sociology at the Department of Political Science at the University of Bamberg and a Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center where he has previously been head of the Emmy-Noether research group ‘Immigration Policies in Comparison’ (IMPIC). He works on immigration and citizenship policies, nationalism, national identities, xenophobia/islamophobia, and right-wing populism. His research was awarded the Young Scholar Research Award from the Mayor of Berlin, the Best Article Award (Honorable Mention) by APSA’s Section on Migration and Citizenship and the Best Paper Award by the Immigration Research Network of the Council for European Studies. He has also received a Fernand Braudel Fellowship at EUI and an ARC Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at CUNY.