Over the last decade or so, the comparative study of nationalism has produced a large number of cogent critiques of classifying nations according to how ethnic or civic they are. In fact, these critiques have been so convincing that many scholars today seem to agree that any mention of the words 'ethnic' and 'civic' is unwarranted. This is unfortunate, because the distinction still offers a useful heuristic device to compare and classify different nation-building practices. This article analyses naturalization policies in twenty-six Western immigrant-receiving democracies in order to show that the distinction constitutes a valuable analytical tool to explore how different countries deal with newcomers. The naturalization policy index developed in this article proves to have a high degree of face validity, to be a good predictor of actual naturalization practices, and to match up well with previous classifications of ethnic and civic nation-building practices.

This article aims to contribute to the debate on institutional change by introducing social structure as the basis for theorizing about the direction of such change. The empirical context is the long-term trends of federal institutional change in the federations of the industrialized West (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States). It is the authors' contention that institutions change in order to reach a better fit with the underlying linguistic structure. The direction for institutional change in federal systems with territorially based linguistic heterogeneity is decentralizing, for homogeneous ones the direction is centralizing. The argument is based on the growing importance of language as the provider of democratic space. It is through the less formalized interest group politics that the underlying linguistic base finds its way into influencing the direction of institutional change.

Although new institutionalism has long been criticised for presenting overly static accounts of social reality, that critique is becoming increasingly unwarranted. In recent years, historical, ideational and rational choice institutionalists have produced a rich body of literature on mechanisms and processes of institutional change. This article reviews this emerging literature and concludes that the most promising avenue for future research is to further explore the potential for combining insights from the three subtypes of institutionalism. In the hopes of encouraging future studies of institutional change to engage more explicitly in theoretical integration, this article proposes a sequential approach to combining insights from different traditions and providing comprehensive accounts of exogenous and endogenous processes of institutional change.

Depuis les années 1990, plusieurs pays occidentaux ont imposé des restrictions à l'accès aux programmes d'aide sociale pour les immigrants, créant ainsi de nouvelles formes d'exclusion des immigrants par rapport aux citoyens nés dans ces pays. On reconnaît en général que le Canada a résisté à cette tendance. Dans cet article, nous montrons toutefois que l'exclusion peut prendre diverses formes. En plus d'être explicitement exclus des programmes sociaux, les immigrants peuvent y avoir seulement un accès limité à cause de certains mécanismes directs ou indirects de différenciation dans les critères d'admissibilité. L'analyse que nous avons faite de cinq programmes essentiels d'aide sociale indique ainsi que le système d'aide sociale canadien entraîne des types d'exclusion directs, indirects et non officiels, qui ont toutefois des effets différents selon les catégories d'immigrants. Donc, si cette conclusion ne suggère aucunement que les immigrants font face, au Canada, à autant de formes d'exclusion que dans certains autres pays occidentaux, elle démontre cependant qu'il est nécessaire d'éviter une attitude d'autosatisfaction face aux droits sociaux garantis aux immigrants au Canada.

Although immigrants' place in welfare state systems is of large relevance to academics and policymakers alike, there have been few attempts to compare immigrants' social rights in different countries at different moments in time systematically. This article presents the results from a comparative policy analysis that maps immigrants' access to seven different social programmes, in 20 different Western democracies, at four different points in time. The main findings are threefold. First, there are large differences in the extent to which different welfare states differentiate in benefit extension between immigrants and native‐born citizens. Second, over the last two decades, many countries have adjusted their welfare systems with the specific aim to accommodate immigrants, whereas many have also introduced punitive barriers that require immigrants to satisfy additional requirements. Third, these developments seem largely driven by politics: in particular, the adoption of punitive barriers has been more common in places where the political climate is more hostile to immigrants. These findings raise important questions about the future of social protection in an era of cross‐border mobility.