MAARTEN VINK

Maarten Vink
Assistant Professor
Political Science
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Universiteit Maastricht

m.vink@politics.unimaas.nl

Maarten P. Vink is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science of the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands and Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Leiden (2003), was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2003-2004) and held Visiting Scholarships at the Center for European Studies, New York University (Fall 2004) and at the Department of Philosophy and Culture at the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal (Fall 2005).

His areas of teaching are European integration, comparative politics, immigration studies and research methods. Within the Maastricht European Studies programs Maarten Vink coordinates the second year BA course Comparative Politics and Government and the MA module Europeanization and Domestic Change. Vink supervises Bachelor papers, Master theses and doctoral dissertations on topics related to European integration, citizenship and immigration, and comparative politics.

Vink's research interests are European integration, immigration, citizenship and comparative methodology. His current research project Membership Matters is a world-wide comparative study of the changing dynamics of citizenship attribution, which uses configurational comparative methods to identify patterns of historical variation and contemporary change. Vink recently co-authored an extensive comparative study on citizenship attribution in 18 European countries, commissioned by the Dutch Advisory Comittee for Aliens Affairs. He is part of the management team of the EUCITAC project on Access to Citizenship in Europe, which aims to set up an online European citizenship observatory (based at the European University Institute in Florence), and also is a collaborator of the CITMODES project on Citizenship in Modern European States (based at the University of Edinburgh).

At the Institute of Social Sciences in Lisbon, Vink is involved in developing a vote orientation website for the upcoming Portuguese legislative elections in 2009 (see Bússola Eleitoral).

Vink co-edited a 25-chapter handbook Europeanization: New Research Agendas (Palgrave Macmillan 2007). A paperback version was published in April 2008. His monograph Limits of European Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) deals with the impact of European integration on domestic immigration policies, in particular in the Netherlands. He published papers in international journals such as Acta Politica, Citizenship Studies, European Integration Online Papers, European Political Science, Field Methods, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Refugee Studies, Political Studies Review, and West European Politics. Vink is managing editor of the COMPASSS Working Paper series on systematic comparative methods.

Research

Membership Matters: The Politics of Citizenship Attribution in Thirty Developed Democracies

Maarten Vink (Maastricht University) 

Citizenship is an important organizing principle of political life. For individuals it is a legal status that creates a vital bond with a state and endows them with civil, political and socio-economic rights and obligations. For states, citizenship defines a constituent population and therefore regulates access to domestic labor markets and welfare provisions. It is also a cohesive institution through which national communities perpetually reconstitute themselves with emotional appeals for loyalty and solidarity. The recent controversy in the Netherlands about the dual citizenship statuses of two junior ministers illustrates how citizenship is at the heart of emotional debates about national allegiance that are inescapable in a globalized world.

By studying how states across the world regulate the acquisition and loss of citizenship, this project aims to put these political discussions in a comparative perspective in order to understand the contemporary dynamics of citizenship attribution. The social significance of this project is that more systematic information on developments across countries can clarify public debates about the scope and the background of legislative changes. The academic relevance is a contribution to a research agenda that strongly needs more systematic comparative work.

Beyond Pathology: Explaining the Use of Preliminary References by Domestic Courts in EU Member States

Maarten Vink (Maastricht University) and Monica Claes (Tilburg University)

The preliminary reference procedure serves to ensure a uniform interpretation and application of European law across the member states of the European Union. It provides that domestic courts in EU member states can, and in some cases must, refer questions on the interpretation or the validity of European law to the Court of Justice in Luxembourg. While the use of preliminary references by national courts in the European Union has increased steadily since the mid-1970s, the number of references to the ECJ from courts in the different member states varies greatly. Existing explanations can be grouped in two sets of hypotheses: a group of functionalist explanations focuses on the European involvement of member states (importance of intra-EU trade and support for integration) and a group of institutionalist hypotheses focuses on the domestic legal framework (legal doctrine and judicial review). While agreeing that both sets of explanations are relevant, we object to the often underlying pathological analysis that sees differences between member states in the use of the preliminary reference procedure as a sign of non-compliance. We argue that a relatively limited use of preliminary references, as in Scandinavian countries, may well be sign of  good compliance. The few available empirical tests also neglect or underestimate two intuitively plausible factors: country size and litigation rates. In other words, bigger and highly judicialized countries send more references to Luxembourg. We use a dataset with data from 1995 to 2006 to test explanations for the fifteen old EU member states in a mixed quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis.

Not quite crisp, not yet fuzzy? Assessing the potentials and pitfalls of multi-value QCA

Maarten Vink (Maastricht University) and Olaf van Vliet (Leiden University)

This paper assesses the strengths and shortcomings of multi-value Qualitative Comparative Analysis (mvQCA), a comparative technique for small to medium size datasets that has been integrated in the TOSMANA software developed by Lasse Cronqvist.  The main difference with ´crisp-set´ QCA is that in mvQCA the conditions can have more values than just the Boolean values 0 and 1, while the main difference with ´fuzzy-set´ QCA is that mvQCA conditions remain discrete. The major advantage of non-dichotomous categorization, according to its proponents, is that it reduces the likelihood of contradictory configurations due to a more homogenous grouping of cases. We give an overview of existing mvQCA applications, with a detailed discussion of two recent publications, and argue that crisp-set and fuzzy-set alternatives should be less easily discarded as the mvQCA solution comes with substantial set-theoretical costs.
Forthcoming in Field Methods (accepted for publication 23 September 2008) Meervoudige nationaliteit in Europees perspectief

EUCITAC (Access to Citizenship in Europe)

This project aims to set up a specialized comparative European observatory on citizenship laws and policies in the 27 member states of the EU and neighbouring countries. It will be nested within the European Democracy Observatory (EUDO) based at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute as well as within the CITMODES project based at the EUROPA institute of the University of Edinburgh. EUCITAC will provide a unique and comprehensive information resource on citizenship in Europe for governments, researchers, migrant organisations and NGOs.  It will identify major trends and problems in citizenship policies as a basis for informed policies and community action. EUCITAC builds on two earlier pioneering projects NATAC and CPNEU, which produced comparative reports and data on citizenship in the EU-15 states and the new member states respectively. The project is directed by Rainer Bauböck and Jo Shaw and is financed by DG Justice, Freedom and Security of the European Commission.

Downloads
Project outline ´Membership Matters´: Membership Matters.PDF Vink, M. and O. van Vliet (2009).

Not quite crisp, not yet fuzzy? Assessing the potentials and pitfalls of multi-value QCA. Field Methods, forthcoming (accepted for publication).: Vink & Van Vliet_mvQCA_Field Methods.pdf

Maarten P. Vink and Gerard-Rene de Groot (2009/10), ´Citizenship Attribution in Western Europe: International Framework and Domestic Trends´, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, forthcoming.: Vink and De Groot_JEMS.pdf