Migrants, Minorities, Belongings and Citizenship. Glocalization and ...

The major objection to a comparison strategy with empirical ideal types is that no choice
of an empirical ideal type, on which comparisons are to be based, can be justifiable
based on satisfactorily objective scientific criteria. Secondly, as the situation of Europe is
different from the existing empirical ideal types, such a comparison strategy would not
produce valid knowledge. Thirdly, deployment of empirical ideal types in comparative
analyses may result in establishing an empirical model as a norm. Furthermore, the
cases’ proximity to or distance from empirical ideal types may result in ignoring
important particularities of the cases. Therefore, Glocalmig opts for a strategy where all
empirical cases are treated equally and where no empirical case is assumed to be a
model for the others.
Another problem with the above measurement and scaling strategies is that they deploy
only one ideal type of the phenomena. As an alternative to these two strategies of
comparison, the University of Bergen has developed the prototypes of three
complementary comparative analysis strategies, which are designed to by-pass the
aforementioned defects in the existing methods. 2 These are:
● Descriptive Comparison of Absolute Values of Cases.
● Comparison with multiple empirical ideal types (relative measurement), which
employs a separate ideal type for each case. In Glocalmig, the quality of citizenship
of the most privileged part of majority population in each country has been
employed as the empirical ideal type for each country; thus measuring the quality
of citizenship in each country with respect to its own privileged citizens.
● Comparison with multiple contesting theoretical ideal types (normative
measurement), which employs the existing as well as Glocalmig’s own ideal type in
an analysis technique that simultaneously compares both the ideal types
themselves and the cases with the ideal types. Scales and rankings here will be
based on multiple contesting theories.
Used together, these three methods of comparison, measurement and scaling/ranking
constitute an unprecedented set of research tools for comparatively mapping and
assessing the quality of citizenships in Europe as well as a device for continuously
monitoring the changes in policy-related facts for developing inclusive citizenship
practices and European public spaces. Concerning Glocalmig’s strategic and scientific
2 These have been developed in Sicakkan, H.G. Senses That Make Noise & Noises That Make Sense (1999), The
Political Historical Roots of West European Models of Citizenship (1999), Rasisme mellom republikansime og
kommunitarisme (1998), all published by Bergen: IMER N/B Publications.
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