Anton Ahlén

This article analyses the development of family-immigration admission policies in 4 Europe between 1990 and 2018. It assesses three expectations in previous research: policy 5 convergence, a 'race to the bottom', and a 'civic turn'. Drawing on the IMPIC dataset, the article 6 distinguishes between eligibility criteria, which define who may sponsor or enter as a family 7 member, and qualifying conditions, which impose additional economic or integration-related 8 requirements. The analysis combines policy-event counts, average restrictiveness, policy 9 dispersion and a configurational mapping of 20 European countries. The results show a clear 10 restrictive drift, driven primarily by qualifying conditions rather than a uniform narrowing of 11 eligibility. Crosscountry variation declined over the period as a whole, but convergence was 12 partial and uneven, and countries did not adopt a single policy model. The findings point less to a 13 straightforward race to the bottom or uniform civic turn than to a broader conditionality turn. 14 15