The politics of burden‐sharing in the field of asylum policy within the European Union is largely a story about numbers. This article presents a quantitative analysis of the development of asylum applications and recognition rates in EU Member States over the past twenty years. Starting from the assumptions, first, that asylum seekers tend to go those countries where there is a higher chance of being recognized as refugee, and second, that the EU has been instrumental in legitimating a curb on generosity in traditionally more lenient states, we hypothesize a converging ‘asylum burden’ among EU Member States. The empirical data presented here provide initial support for this ‘implicit burden‐sharing thesis’.
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Maarten Vink (2003) studied this question.