MOBILE – Open Lab with Maren Lüdecke

Inequalities in Asylum Adjudication in Germany

Guest presenter: Maren Lüdecke is a PhD student in Political Science and Public Administration at the Graduate School of Social and Behavioural Sciences and a research assistant in the project ‘Administrative Inequality: Foreign Citizens in Germany’ of the Cluster of Excellence ‘The Politics of Inequality’, both at the University of Konstanz.

Presentation: Germany’s asylum adjudication is characterized by concerning disparities in rejection rates across federal states. These discrepancies point to unequal practices and treatment by the responsible administrative courts, which is also highlighted in qualitative research. However, quantitative analyses of asylum adjudication by these courts remain scarce, primarily due to the lack of accessible, disaggregated data. In this talk, I will first introduce a new database on German asylum adjudication (2010-2021) that is currently being developed by the Administrative Inequality Project. This database allows us to analyse a wide range of factors from various perspectives, which might add to our understanding of the observed inequalities. Using this data, I will show some new empirical insights into inequalities in asylum adjudication. Furthermore, I suggest a study that aims to shed light on the variation in asylum adjudication between courts from an organizational perspective. First, I will provide the first comprehensive overview of the staff working at administrative courts, focusing on its characteristics such as gender, age, seniority, academic qualifications, and judicial position. Second, I will explore the association between court composition and court performance, including aspects like backlog, duration of proceedings, and rejection rates.