Massachusetts, US, 15th May 2025, ZEX PR WIRE, Scholar and policy analyst Philip Kretsedemas has published a landmark peer-reviewed article titled Explaining Asylum Law Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis in the internationally recognized journal Laws (Volume 13, Issue 4). The article explores the complex interplay between jurisprudence and politics in U.S. asylum decisions, using an innovative application of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to examine how appellate courts rule on asylum cases involving kinship-based claims.
Kretsedemas’ research marks a major contribution to legal studies by spotlighting the underappreciated role of jurisprudential reasoning—especially the “nexus” requirement—in asylum case outcomes. In contrast to previous work that emphasized political partisanship, his analysis reveals that judicial decisions were most strongly influenced by case-specific legal reasoning and court-specific decision patterns.
The study focuses on asylum rulings from the first year of the Trump presidency, when immigration law was under intense political scrutiny. By honing in on 35 family-based asylum cases out of 319 total reviewed, the article shows how logic-based legal principles often overpowered overt political affiliations in determining outcomes. According to the findings, two key factors—whether the petitioner established a clear nexus between their persecution and a protected ground, and the unique decision-making patterns of individual appellate courts—were the most decisive.
“This study is about clarifying the mechanics of legal decision-making and showing that legal reasoning still matters,” Kretsedemas explains. “While politics certainly exerts influence, it doesn’t always determine outcomes in the way many assume.”
Kretsedemas brings over two decades of interdisciplinary expertise to the topic, blending sociological insight with legal analysis. His article also serves as a call to other researchers to adopt QCA as a valuable tool for examining small but richly detailed legal case populations.
The article is open access and available via MDPI at: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/13/4/53.
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