A research to the construction of a measurement tool for European visa policy

Abstract

The European border regime is a popular subject for criticism in academic literature, most notably for its formerly named Black list and White list. This thesis strives to investigate the current ways of measuring the external visa-policies of the Schengen Area and how they can be improved. It does this by analyzing three tools for this measurement, namely the Henley & Partners Passport Index, the research of Mau et al (2017) into the global mobility divide and Hobolth’s paper (2012), which tries to explain the variation of openness of the EU’s external border. The main finding is that Hobolth’s methodology is the most thorough. The paper by Mau et al, however, can be used to improve the theoretical side of the research by Hobolth. For instance, the fact that Mau et al find an increasing amount of bifurcation in Visa regimes can be used to explain the fact that interest groups do not seem to have a large degree of influence over the past few years in the Hobolth paper.