Maarten Vink

@maartenpvink

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Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· 23d

Yes. But keep in mind that the American passport’s decline is modest in absolute terms. So it’s mainly a story about relative decline (change in rank). open.substack.com/pub/maartenp...

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· 23d

It was an honor to speak today at the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Italian Chamber of Deputies & share evidence from @globalcit.bsky.social, commenting on deeply problematic proposals to restrict access to citizenship for native-born immigrants' children, and widen grounds for revocation.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· 27d

Did an interview with @berlingske.bsky.social on worrying developments on citizenship revocation across Europe (esp in Belgium, drastic changes earlier this year). I guess this reaction is a badge of honor… www.berlingske.dk/politik/euro...

Are Danish taxpayers working on construction sites paying for Maarten Vink’s alleged “research”? Because if so, they should get their money back if he does not even follow Supreme Court judgments. I can see that he says he is on Bluesky, which means he is an insignificant loser.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Jul 2

Huh what? La pizza Ananas…?

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Jul 2

Compliments to @imiscoe.bsky.social HQ and local organisers for a great conference in beautiful Girona

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Jun 27

I think this one is just about decent beer. 🍻

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Jun 24

Interesting to read the lived experiences of questions around citizenship acquisition in the context of Brexit.

pre-settled status, in my eyes is still very different from citizenship. Why didn't the government offer us free citizenship once Brexit was confirmed? I feel that if i made one mistake, I'll be sent packing as opposed to be treated like a local.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Jun 8

Insightful @globalcit.bsky.social blogpost on the end of Swedish exceptionalism in citizenship policy, by Christian Fernández. Including the story of the “voting coup” by the Sweden Democrats that overcame a parliamentary majority against applying new rules retroactively. To be continued, for sure.

[1] According to the so-called “pairing-off system” (Swe. “kvittningssystemet”), the MPs shall always respect the distribution of mandates between the parties, which means that uneven absences between opposition and majority should be evened out at the time of the vote. This informal rule required the Sweden Democrats to pull back a couple of MPs from the vote, which they did not do, as revealed after the fact. Since this is only an unwritten rule, there does not seem to be any viable legal action for the opposition, and the decision holds. The speaker summoned all the parties a few days later, but no agreement was reached, which, for the time being, compels all MPs to be present every time there is a vote in Parliament.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Jun 5

Nothing beats a Friday apero in Florence with the crew from the @globalcit.bsky.social and friends ❤️ 🍷 🍹 🍕 Today at the Giardino dell’Orticoltura.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Jun 2

Short answer: the US decline is real but small. The UAE rise is the only headline movement. With most of the top-tier countries compressing together, this exaggerates the relative decline of the American passport in the ranking.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· May 23

See also explanatory report ECN: rm.coe.int/16800ccde7

Sub-paragraph d
67. The wording “conduct seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the State Party” is drawn
from Article 8, paragraph 3.a.ii of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.
Such conduct notably includes treason and other activities directed against the vital interests
of the State concerned (for example work for a foreign secret service) but would not include
criminal offences of a general nature, however serious they might be.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· May 7

Why build scaffolding to paint a house when you can just abseil down the façade? Florentine efficiency. 💪

painters abseiling down facade of a house in Florence

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Apr 2

Fully agree with this conclusion by @dorfonlaw.bsky.social on what is at stake in the SCOTUS case on birthright citizenship. As much as the comparativist in me is interested in discussing pros/cons of alternatives, we can’t lose sight of the specific US context. verdict.justia.com/2026/03/31/t...

Under very different circumstances, it might be possible to offer sound policy arguments for jus sanguinis or a hybrid approach to determining citizenship. In the contemporary United States, however, the efforts to narrow birthright citizenship rest on odiously racist views. Thus, if and when the Supreme Court rejects Trump’s citizenship EO, the ruling should be celebrated not only as a vindication of the Constitution’s meaning but also as the triumph of a deep principle of American democracy.
POSTED IN: CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
TAGS: 14TH AMENDMENT, BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, SCOTUS
Michael C. Dorf
MICHAEL C. DORF
Michael C. Dorf is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell University

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 27

As always, when looking at data on the 'naturalisation rate', do so with a healthy dose of caution.

The naturalisation rate is the ratio between the number of persons who acquired the citizenship of a country during a calendar year and the stock of non-national residents in the same country at the beginning of the year. The term 'naturalisation rate', however, is doubly misleading: first of all because the numerator includes all modes of acquisitions and not just naturalisations, then because it should not be interpreted as a demographic rate since the denominator includes all non-nationals and not the relevant population, i.e. those non-nationals who are eligible for naturalisation.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 27

It is indeed curious that until now the requirements for permanent residence were more strict that for citizenship. Interested to know more about how that came about. Of course it is difficult to argue that naturalisation was too lenient when only 9,200 foreign nationals naturalized in 2025…

Currently, applicants must in principle have lived in Japan for at least five consecutive years to qualify for naturalization, compared with 10 years required for permanent residency.

Screening standards have also been less strict. Insurance payment checks cover one year of records for naturalization applicants, versus two years for permanent residency. Tax certificate requirements have been determined case by case, with company executives typically asked to submit three years of records — fewer than the five years required for permanent residency

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 24

Congrats! The e-version of your book made it to our library catalogue in Florence, so our whole @globalcit.bsky.social group @eui-eu.bsky.social has access to it. Looking forward to reading it and learning from your great work.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 24

Thanks for having me over in Brussels, @ecas-europe.bsky.social for this engaging discussion on developments in citizenship acquisition and nationality law across the EU, drawing on our data and research from @globalcit.bsky.social. @eui-schuman.bsky.social @eui-ggp.bsky.social

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 23

Apparentemente sono l'unico ad aver capito che ci sono anche degli autobus supplementari in servizio… Che confusione!

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 23

Il casino habituale sul (costoso) Marconi Express per l'aeroporto di Bologna

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 20

Beyond the RoW discussion, at least for Portugal the observation remains that also a decline in the liberal democracy index, which seems to be the basis for the "autocratization" claim in the Democracy Report. This is where the point in the Commentary on the uncertainty estimates is relevant.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 20

and here indeed exactly my concern re: Portugal (and similar cases)

Leaving aside a more technical discussion of the RoW’s rules and
operational choices (which we have concerns about), let us simply
point out that RoW leads to some rather unorthodox classifications.
For example, the countries that lost their status as a liberal democracy between 2012 and 2024 include Austria, Canada, Portugal, and
the United Kingdom. These countries are widely regarded as “liberal democracies” according to conventional uses of the term, and
they score, respectively, 0.76, 0.74, 0.75, and 0.75 on LDI in 2024.
These scores are only a decimal point below top-scoring countries
such as Norway (5th-ranked; 0.84) and Sweden (4th-ranked; 0.85)
– meaning they are safely classified as liberal democracies on both
of our alternative measures, both in 2012 and 2024. Interestingly, RoW
categorizes some countries with substantially lower LDI scores as liberal democracies, including South Africa (0.65), Jamaica (0.68), and
Italy (.71) in 2024. In 2012, Serbia (0.49) and Bhutan (0.51) were registered as liberal democracies by RoW with much lower LDI scores.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 20

Ah. Thanks. That's right. These are all very good points, esp re: uncertainty estimates and crisp categories.

Third, the DR relies heavily on crisp categories. For example, it reports
that 91 of 179 countries are “autocracies” and less than 12 percent
of the global population lives in “liberal democracies.” V-Dem does
not have an official categorization of “autocracies” or “liberal democracies.” To compose these categories, the DR draws heavily on the
Regimes of the World (RoW) typology. RoW combines information
from various (continuous) V-Dem measures, imposing inherently
arbitrary cut-offs to categorize countries into types.1
It is difficult to
overemphasize this fundamental point: classification of countries
into different distinct types presupposes an underlying theoretical
notion of qualitative differences between one type and another. We
may certainly imagine some such qualitative distinctions as essential.
Regimes not even holding elections can, for example, never qualify
as democracies. What we are mainly talking about here, however,
are countries that all hold elections and that thus only differ among
themselves in terms of things such as the degree of certain freedoms
enjoyed by their citizens or the degree of the judicial and legislative
constraints on the executive. There is nothing qualitative that differs
among countries falling just above or just below a certain threshold imposed on these underlying continuous scales. This makes any
classification of a country into a “liberal” or simply “electoral democracy” inherently arbitrary.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 20

On the LD/ED distinction

A country is classified as a liberal democracy if the experts consider the country’s laws to have been transparent; the men and women there as having had access to the justice system; and the country as having had broad features of a liberal democracy overall. If it does not meet one of these conditions, the country is classified as an electoral democracy.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 20

And here the map from the 2018 RoW article. www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandg...

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 20

It seems the operationalization of the RoW typology needs to be tweaked/reconsidered. Makes a lot of sense that the US moved into the ED category, but Canada, Portugal, UK? Not so sure.

Democracy, 2025
Classification by Lührmann et al. (2018) based on expert estimates by V-Dem.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 19

2025 Rule of Law Report Country Chapter on the rule of law situation in Portugal commission.europa.eu/document/dow...

ABSTRACT
In Portugal, significant steps have been taken to improve the human resources allocated to the
justice system, thanks to new recruitments and legislative changes. The early end of the
legislature had an impact on some reforms, such as those related to the system of case
allocation, the efficiency of complex criminal cases, and access to judgments, which could
not be finalised. The High Council for the Judiciary has called for a reflection on possible
mechanisms to ensure its stability and safeguard its independence. The efficiency of
Administrative and Tax Courts improved in first instance, while serious concerns remain
regarding the disposition time in second instance courts, especially among businesses. The
working conditions and security in court and prosecution premises affect the functioning of
the courts. Changes to the legal aid system were introduced to address the low level of
remuneration of legal aid providers, with the Bar Association calling for further changes.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 19

Thanks, that is helpful. Still curious to understand if there is something that changed in Portugal that makes laws no longer ‘transparent’, or if somehow the expert coding changed… Yes, the justice system is very slow, but not transparent? 🤔

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 18

Understand that 'autocratising' is a relative measure (a process) but counterintuitive to put Portugal in the same group as, say, Russia...

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 18

Thanks. Seems the electoral democracy score for Portugal decreased from around .84 in 2015 to just over .7 in 2025. Will have to dig deeper into the disaggregated scores, I guess, to figure out what precisely was the reason for that.

Maarten Vink@maartenpvink· Mar 18

But still leaves the reference to Portugal as one of the countries "very close to becoming autocratizers". Lots of things you can say about Portuguese politics, but that really does not make sense. Does this have to do with a relatively low score on EGALITARIAN COMPONENT INDEX (ECI)? I'm puzzled.