Few decisions carry greater significance than the one made when a person applies for asylum. The individuals responsible for evaluating an asylum seeker’s application are case officers at the Swedish Migration Agency. Case officers—whether in the asylum process or in any other process related to access to public services—have considerable discretion. They are the ones who conduct the investigation, analyze the individual’s circumstances in relation to their home country, and present a recommendation that leads to a decision in the individual case.
Previous studies have shown that decisions made by decision-makers can be influenced by legally irrelevant factors such as the time of day, gender, or experience. It is therefore not unreasonable to expect that the outcome of an asylum process might be affected by who the case officers are and by their characteristics.
This report examines who the case officers and decision-makers at the Swedish Migration Agency are, what decisions they make, and to what extent their socioeconomic and demographic profiles correlate with their decisions.
The authors of the report are Henrik Andersson, researcher in economics at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University, Linna Martén, researcher at the Swedish Institute for Social Research at Stockholm University), and Kristoffer Jutvik, Assistant Professor at the Department of Culture and Society at Linköping University.