In their contribution, Ines Michalowski and Ricky van Oers discuss Sara Wallace Goodman’s article on civic integration policies in EU 15 (‘Integration Requirements for Integration’s Sake? Identifying, Categorising and Comparing Civic Integration Policies‘, JEMS, Volume 36, Issue 5, 2010). They raise two main objections. Firstly, the scores of Goodman’s Civic Integration Policy Index (CIVIX), and the policy configurations they produce to enable understanding of state membership strategies, are not replicable with scores from the Migrant Integration Policy Index III or MIPEX (Migration Policy Group 2011). They attribute this to disparities in measurement error. Secondly, there is limited analytical utility of citizenship policy in understanding why states make civic integration choices. In response to these points, Sara Wallace Goodman presents the case that MIPEX and CIVIX indices measure different dimensions of policy and use different scoring rules to do so, and that Michalowski and van Oers infer causality between citizenship and civic integration, misconstruing and misrepresenting her original interpretation of policy significance.

Publication details and link to source: Ines Michalowski, Ricky van Oers and by Sara Wallace Goodman (eds.), ‘Debate on the coding of civic integration policies in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Volume 38, Issue 1, 2012.