The State and the Refugee. Governing Asylum at the Intersection Between Politics and Administration

This article examines how asylum decisions in European Union member states are shaped by the tension between administrative assessment and government preferences. Moving beyond the conventional binary distinction between protection and rejection, it focuses on the choice between different protection statuses (refugee, subsidiary, and national statuses) which entail distinct rights and long-term settlement implications. Building on insights from public administration and executive politics, the article develops an explanatory model in which governments seek to steer asylum outcomes in line with their preferences on immigration but are constrained by administrative evaluations of claim merit and public scrutiny. Empirically, the article tests the mechanism on first-instance asylum decisions across EU member states using seemingly unrelated regression models. The findings show that government preferences significantly influence how protection is allocated across statuses, particularly when public scrutiny is low. Under high public salience, restrictive governments are constrained to grant refugee status where claims are well-founded but pursue their preferences by curbing subsidiary protection, while more permissive governments apply protection criteria more stringently. National protection emerges as highly responsive to government preferences. This article advances a more nuanced understanding of asylum governance as a negotiated outcome between legality, political responsiveness, and public accountability.