Naturalization fosters the long-term political integration of immigrants

The political integration of immigrant minorities is one of the most pressing policy issues many countries face today. Despite heated debates, there exists little rigorous evidence about whether naturalization fosters or dampens the integration of immigrants into the political fabric of the host society. Our study provides new causal evidence on the long-term effects of naturalization on political integration. Our research design takes advantage of a natural experiment in Switzerland that allows us to separate the independent effect of naturalization from the nonrandom selection into naturalization. We find that in our sample, naturalization caused long-lasting improvements in political integration, with immigrants becoming likely to vote and attaining considerably higher levels of political efficacy and political knowledge.