Constraints on Executive Power: Explaining Variation in Humanitarian Migration Policies

It is widely accepted that judicial and other constraints on executive powers have resulted in the acceptance of ‘unwanted’ (in contrast to targeted) immigration to liberal states. This has been shown in particular in the field of irregular migration and family migration through national case studies and small N research designs.  So far, however, there has been little systematic analysis to trace variations in the constraints on executive power that exist in different destination states and how such differences have an impact on policy outputs and outcomes. This is especially so in a third area of ‘unwanted immigration’, namely the case of asylum-seekers and refugees. Drawing on a large-N dataset of OECD countries, this paper explores to what extent variation in non-majoritarian constraints on executive power is able to account for differences in domestic refugee regimes and their protection extensiveness. To analyse the effects of such variation we develop a dataset that combines measures of judicial constraints (building on Lijphart) with measures on immigration policy outputs (the IMPALA immigration policy database).