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PROOF
1
Political Opportunities, Social
Capital and the Political Inclusion
of Immigrants in European Cities*
Laura Morales and Marco Giugni
Discussions about how public policies can promote more effectively the
active engagement and participation of immigrants and their children1
in the political and civic life of the countries where they live are at the
core of current scholarly and public debates. In advanced democracies,
there are recurrent disputes about the appropriateness and potential benefits
or shortcomings of introducing legal reforms that would guarantee that
large immigrant populations – and especially their native-born children – are
not excluded from the political process and from political representation.
As Jones-Correa (1998: 35 and 46ff.) notes, migrants’ political marginalization has several potential negative implications for democratic politics: it
undermines the process of democratic representation and accountability, it
undervalues the role of active participation in the polity for the construction
of the political community, and it perpetuates the view of immigrants and
their descendants as outsiders to that community. Furthermore, the negative
consequences related to migrants’ political exclusion are likely to spill over
to their social and economic integration, as the policy process will fail to
address adequately their needs in these domains. Yet, there are widely
divergent views on what are the most effective ways to promote migrants’
political inclusion, and on when and under what conditions should firstgeneration immigrants be granted full political rights.
In its basic outlines, these different views correspond to different ‘models’
or conceptions of citizenship and of how the polity absorbs newcomers to
the community. While some conceptions of citizenship privilege territorial
belonging to the community, others give much more importance to ethnic
and cultural lineages in the attribution of membership status (Brubaker, 1992).
Furthermore, when confronted with new entrants to the community, different
conceptions of citizenship come to terms with ethnic and cultural diversity
in contrasting ways. Some promote it and celebrate it, while others view
ethnic and cultural practices as something that belongs in the private realm
at the same time that the state should aspire to neutral action based on equal
treatment and blindness towards diversity (see, for example, Taylor, 1992;
1
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PROOF
2 Political Opportunities, Social Capital and the Political Inclusion
Soysal, 1994; Favell, 1998; Joppke, 1998; Entzinger, 2000; Rex, 2000).
Clearly, there are very few examples of cases that follow purely each of
these polar models, and conceptions of citizenship and their implementation into legal codes and practices are constantly subject to social and
political change (Joppke, 2000), sometimes even leading to a certain degree
of convergence that originates in divergent political strategies (Feldblum,
1998). Yet, there is a growing consensus that different citizenship regimes
do have a substantial impact on the degree of and paths to migrants’ political incorporation or integration (Ireland, 1994 and 2000; Koopmans and
Statham, 2000b; Koopmans et al., 2005; Bloemraad, 2006b).
In this regard, American and the European scholarship has typically
approached the study of the political engagement of migrants from sharply
different perspectives. In the US, issues related to the political dimension of
immigrant incorporation have been – until very recently – largely neglected
by political scientists and sociologists, as the privileged focus of attention
has been economic and social incorporation. Notable exceptions to this
general sidelining of political incorporation is the work by Jones-Correa
(1998), Gerstle and Mollenkopf (2001), Bloemraad (2006b), Ramakrishnan
and Bloemraad (2008), and Hochschild and Mollenkopf (2009a). Moreover,
often the emphasis of the American literature has been either on tracing the
historical and political processes that lead to migrants’ political incorporation (for example, Savidge Sterne, 2001; Ueda, 2001; McKeever, 2001) or on
identifying the individual predictors of migrants’ political engagement (for
example, DeSipio, 1996; Tam Cho, 1999; Leal et al., 2008).
In contrast, in general terms, the European scholarship has developed a
larger body of work that is specifically concerned with the political dimension
of migrants’ integration. Partly due to a lack of adequate survey data, and partly
due to the prevailing academic traditions, European academia has privileged
the study of the contextual and institutional factors when accounting for
the different levels and pathways of migrant integration to the political
process (for example, Ireland, 1994; Rex, 2000; Togeby, 2004; Garbaye, 2005;
Fieldhouse and Cutts, 2008). And in so doing, it has borrowed a solid preexisting theoretical framework that is able to account for the variations in
migrants’ political incorporation across settings: political opportunity theory
(Koopmans and Statham, 2000b; Koopmans et al., 2005).
A more recent development in European scholarship has also stressed the
importance of the group-level resources – notably the social capital generated
by the patterns of interaction and linkage of migrants’ organizations – in
understanding why certain groups are more successfully incorporated to the
political process (cf. Fennema and Tillie, 1999 and 2001; Jacobs and Tillie,
2004). This has led, on both sides of the Atlantic, to an increasing interest
in the ways in which migrants’ associations can contribute to speed or slow
the political incorporation of the newcomers (cf. the essays in Ramakrishnan
and Bloemraad, 2008).
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Laura Morales and Marco Giugni
3
In this book, we move a step forward in this research agenda by explicitly
bridging these different but complementary research agendas and traditions.
We believe that a proper understanding of the processes that drive the
political inclusion (or exclusion) of immigrants and their descendants
requires paying attention to the various individual, organizational and contextual factors that are likely to be relevant. As we discuss in the next pages,
the study in which this book is based has carefully collected information
on these three levels of analysis and, hence, takes on board the insights from
both the American and the European traditions.
As we will argue – and as many of the chapters in this volume
show – several aspects of the context of migrants’ integration importantly
shape their chances to become incorporated into the polity. But which
context is the relevant one? Often in this field, scholars have privileged
the national context in their studies (Brubaker, 1992; Soysal, 1994; Joppke
and Morawska, 2003; Koopmans et al., 2005). This is an understandable
development, as the thrust of citizenship and immigration policies is
commonly defined at the nation-state level. However, it is at the local level
where policies with a more direct impact on the daily life of migrants are
designed and implemented (Body-Gendrot and Martiniello, 2000; Penninx
et al., 2004; Borkert and Caponio, 2010). Local governments are the first
to experience the policy challenges brought about by the ethnic, cultural
and social diversity that immigration processes entail (Ireland, 1994; Rogers
and Tillie, 2001; Jones-Correa, 2001), and their responses can complement,
contradict or supplant national policies – especially in what is referred to as
immigrant integration (cf. Alexander, 2003; Penninx, 2006). Consequently,
local policies, local institutional settings and the prevailing public discourses at the local level can importantly shape the pace, intensity and level
of migrants’ incorporation into the public arena. Moreover, these aspects can
substantially vary across local contexts even within the limits imposed by
national policies – mostly, citizenship and flow control policies.
It is also at the local level that migrants usually have greater opportunities
to become involved in political life. In several European countries, both
EU and non-EU citizens are granted voting rights at the local level, and in
all countries migrants are more likely to be able to mobilize successfully
around co-ethnic candidates at the local level. It is also, primarily, the local
context that determines the opportunities that migrants have to form civil
society organizations, forge links with pre-existing local associations and
parties, and rally together for collective action. Additionally, in various cities
consultative structures have been established between the municipal government and the immigrant population, whereas in others the opportunities
for migrants to participate in local decision-making are scarce. The larger
concentration of immigrant-origin minorities in urban spaces also favours
the development of common identities and of feelings of shared fate, thus
fostering the emergence of group consciousness and group mobilization.
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4 Political Opportunities, Social Capital and the Political Inclusion
Furthermore, the local context provides the conditions that will shape
the attitudes of the native population towards migrants, and the reaction of
policy-makers and political elites to the newcomers and their descendants.
Sometimes the political engagement of minorities is the result of specific
political issues that emerge in mainstream city politics. Thus, focusing on
the local level adds several layers of richness to the materials that one can
analyse when studying migrants’ political incorporation.
This book focuses on the local level – on large European metropolitan
cities, in particular – and, therefore, it contributes to examine a level of
government and of social interaction that is still understudied in a broad
comparative perspective. As we will explain in greater detail in the coming
pages, we have collected a vast amount of information that – without
neglecting the importance of the nation-state in determining some of the
conditions for migrants’ political incorporation – inspects how the institutional, associational and societal dimensions of the local context alter the
opportunities that migrants have to become included in the political process.
As such, the book will illuminate the areas of policy intervention that local
governments can identify in their quest to improve the conditions of integration of immigrants and their offspring.
This leads us to the need to highlight that one major problem in the
study of migrants’ political integration is the lack of conceptual clarity
about what ‘integration’ means. What are the exact outcomes that policies and policy-makers should aim at achieving when promoting migrants’
political incorporation? Whereas sociological and economic approaches
to immigrant integration have extensively dealt with this conceptual
issue – albeit not necessarily reaching a consensus – there is much less
elaboration on the political component of integration or incorporation.
Both the scholarly literature and the policy-makers have been using in an
interchangeable fashion notions such as political incorporation, political
integration, political assimilation and political inclusion. Often, it is not
very clear whether all these notions are indeed equivalent and whether
the desired outcome that is pursued is the same in all cases. Because the
notion of political integration is central to our whole endeavor, in Chapter 2
Morales discusses the various conceptual and empirical angles that can
be applied to the study of migrants’ engagement in the civic and political communities of their countries of residence, and outlines the notion
of political integration that we privilege in our approach to this topic at
the same time that she discusses the main tensions inherent in the study
of migrants’ political integration. As is explained in that chapter, we
believe that the most fruitful option is to conceive political integration as
a relative notion that entails comparing the situation of migrants to that
of the autochthonous population. Hence, we view political integration
as equivalent to political inclusion and, consequently, as the absence of
political exclusion.
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Laura Morales and Marco Giugni
5
From that conceptual starting point, this volume analyses in detail the
various factors that lead to (or prevent) a successful integration of migrants
into the political process. As we will detail later in this chapter, the volume
relies on a unique international study that has collected data for 10 European
cities on the individual behaviours, attitudes and characteristics of selected
groups of migrants; on the associational fields of these same groups; on the
socio-demographic composition of the migrant groups; and on the institutional and discursive political opportunities for migrants’ integration. The
uniqueness of the data lies not just on how extensive it is from the point of
view of the number of cases and levels of analysis covered, but also on the
fact that the data has been collected following the same methods and using
the same instruments in all the cities included.
In the remainder of this chapter, we introduce the study to the reader
in more detail. The next section sketches out the main objectives and
framework of the volume, at the same time that it describes what is our
main contribution to the current scholarship on this topic. The third section
provides some important details about the research design and the data that
we use throughout the book, which we believe constitutes an important step
forward in the empirical study of this subject. The final section anticipates
some of the main findings and conclusions of each of the chapters in the
volume.
Understanding migrants’ political integration: micro,
meso and macro factors
Given the definition(s) of political integration discussed earlier, the main
purpose of this book is to assess the degree of political integration (or exclusion)
of migrants in various European cities following a multidimensional analytical perspective that takes into account three main sets of explanatory factors:
the individual characteristics of migrants, their embeddedness in social
(organizational) networks, and the political opportunity structures of their
place of residence (country and city). Figure 1.1 summarizes the theoretical
approach that underlies the focus of this volume.
All three kinds of explanations have their roots in different strands of the
literature on political behaviour and participation. The role of individual
characteristics and resources has long been stressed by students of political
participation (see, for example, Verba et al., 1995; van Deth et al., 2007).
Indeed, the resource model (Verba and Nie, 1972) has long represented the
dominant paradigm in studies of political participation. In this perspective,
aspects such as education and socio-economic status are strong predictors
of participation. According to Verba et al. (1978), for example, political
participation at the individual level is largely determined by civic resources
(time, money and civic skills), which are usually the product of an elevated
socio-economic status.
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6 Political Opportunities, Social Capital and the Political Inclusion
MACRO LEVEL
–
–
–
–
–
–
Political and discursive
opportunity structures
(receiving society)
Local policies towards immigrants’
associations.
Openness of public authorities.
Openness of formal institutions.
Configuration of local power.
General policies towards immigrants.
Prevailing discourse on immigration
and immigrants.
MESO LEVEL
MICRO LEVEL
Organizational social
capital at the group level
POLITICAL
INTEGRATION
(behaviour and
attitudes)
Characteristics of the migrant
group (in receiving society)
–
–
–
–
Socio-demographic composition
and size
Migration history.
Socio-economic status.
Relevant aspects of the political
culture of the ethnic group.
Figure 1.1
Individual characteristics of
migrants
– Social, political and economic
resources (including social
capital).
– Migration-related experiences
and status.
The theoretical approach
The comparative analysis of the political participation and, more generally
speaking, the political integration of citizens of migrant origin in European
cities must pay careful attention to individual characteristics that might
explain why some participate while others do not, why some trust the political institutions of the receiving society while others do not, why some are
interested in the politics of the settlement society while others are not,
while some adhere to the habits and values of the receiving society while
others do not, and so forth. All these aspects are influenced by the personal
resources and skills migrants carry with them and are able to deploy. In this
regard, one specific individual skill is likely to play a crucial role: the command of the language of the place of residence (Jacobs et al., 2004). The
impact of this characteristic, of course, depends on which aspect of integration
we are dealing with. For example, to be interested in the political affairs of
the receiving society one clearly has to have at least some knowledge of
the language. Similarly, one has to take into account the duration of stay
in the country of residence and, partly related to that, the strength of the
homeland ties of individual migrants. We should expect migrants who have
arrived at an early stage of their lives or who have been born in the country
of residence and who, hence, have only a weak relation with their country
of ancestry to be politically more integrated. Yet, these as well as other
predictions relating to the impact of individual characteristics on political
integration need to be explored empirically, including through comparisons
both across ethnic groups and across different settings. This is a major task
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Laura Morales and Marco Giugni
7
of this volume, and one to which it contributes substantially with novel
and unique data.
A second strand of research on political participation has stressed the
role of social integration (Almond and Verba, 1963). This body of literature
emphasizes in particular the importance of being engaged in political,
but also social and cultural, associations (Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993;
Verba et al., 1995; Pattie et al., 2003) as well as the mobilizing potential
of community ties and integration into local networks. Some have also
stressed the importance of integration within the community through the
feeling of attachment to the community and the feeling of trust towards
others (Putnam, 1993 and 2000; Hall, 1999). In this regard, the concept of
social capital has become quite fashionable to capture those (positive) externalities that individuals can draw from their involvement in organizational
networks and that they can bring into their political experience. Starting
from the seminal works of Bourdieu (1984, 1986), Coleman (1988, 1990)
and, more recently, Putnam (1993, 2000), the literature on social capital has
witnessed an important growth in recent years (see Lin, 2001, and Portes,
1998 for overviews).
In the field of immigration and ethnic relations, this perspective has
recently been brought to the fore by Meindert Fennema and Jean Tillie
(1999, 2001). Fennema and Tillie have argued that differences in political
participation of ethnic minorities are linked to differences in what they
call ‘civic community’, which they conceive of above all as ‘ethnic’ social
capital of migrants stemming from participation in ethnic associational life.
Drawing from a research tradition that goes back to Alexis de Tocqueville,
Fennema and Tillie maintain that voluntary associations create social trust,
which spills over into political trust and higher political participation. In
their approach, however, the degree of ethnic civic community is measured
through the density of networks between ethnic organizations (see van
Heelsum, 2005, and Vermeulen, 2006, for a similar perspective). Thus,
networks are seen as reflecting the amount of social capital at the group level.
In this perspective, ‘[s]ocial capital at the group level is a function of (1) the
number of organizations, (2) the variety in the activities of the organizations
and (3) the density of the organizational network’ (Tillie, 2004: 531).
While fundamental both in their findings and for having stimulated
further research, the work by Fennema and Tillie has two main limitations
for the study of individual participation and integration. Firstly, it focuses
on organizational density and the social capital at the group level. Yet, social
capital does not only derive from organizational networks as such, but
is translated into individual resources through involvement in organizations
and other social networks. The number, variety and density of organizations
constitute the social capital at the group level, but if we want to explain the
political integration of migrants we must take into account their involvement in voluntary associations and other structures of social interaction
9780230244160_02_cha01.indd 7
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8 Political Opportunities, Social Capital and the Political Inclusion
at the individual level as well. Secondly, Fennema and Tillie have focused
on ethnic social capital, neglecting the role of cross-ethnic and non-ethnic
networks. In other words, associational involvement may spur ‘bonding’
social capital, but also ‘bridging’ social capital (Putnam, 2000), and research
should be able to analyse the impact of both aspects on the political participation and integration of migrants. In fact, the quality of a multicultural
democracy might well stem more from the bridging than from the bonding
social capital, as the latter lies within a specific community, whereas the
former overcomes the ethnic cleavage.
Recent work by a number of scholars, including Fennema and Tillie
themselves, has tried to respond to both of these limitations. On one hand,
they focus on the individual-level dimension of social capital by looking at
how individual involvement in different types of associations might favour
political participation and integration. The results of these studies were
published in a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
(Berger et al., 2004; Jacobs et al., 2004; Tillie, 2004; Togeby, 2004). These
studies show, on the other hand, that non-ethnic or cross-ethnic organizations play an important role and have a distinct impact on the political
participation of migrants.
This volume follows this line of reasoning by looking at the impact of
organizational membership in different types of voluntary associations
and networks on the political participation and integration of migrants
at the individual level. We improve the existing research by taking into
account the effect of the social capital that develops from organizational
formation and involvement both at the individual and the group level (see,
especially, Chapter 5 by Morales and Pilati, and Chapter 6 by Strömblad
et al. in this book).
Together with political attitudes and motivations, individual characteristics
and social integration form what has been called the ‘civic voluntarism
model’ of political participation (Verba et al., 1995). In this perspective,
‘three main factors influence the decision to participate: the personal
resources used to participate, political attitudes that encourage participation,
and connections to groups or people who ask one to participate’ (Dalton,
2008b: 58). While it has dominated the existing literature, this focus on
individual-level factors overlooks the crucial role played by the political
and institutional context. Indeed, recent work on political participation has
started to stress contextual factors, either on their own (Franklin et al., 1996)
or in conjunction with individual factors (Anduiza, 2002; Bühlmann and
Freitag, 2006; Morales, 2009).
This is all the more important in the case of migrants, as they often face a
political and institutional setting that is completely different from the one
they were used to in their country of origin. Hence, one should seriously
take into account the impact of the context of settlement for migrants’
political integration (Portes and Böröcz, 1989), and specifically the local
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Laura Morales and Marco Giugni
9
variations that we often find within countries. Local contexts are, in this
regard, especially relevant because it is at the local level that many of the
policies and political interactions that have a vital impact on migrants’ lives
develop. For example, the local setting largely determines how political
parties and other political actors react to the arrival of new residents that
can become – eventually – full citizens and voters (Jones-Correa, 1998).
Additionally, in many countries local authorities have sufficient powers on
a number of policy domains that determine migrants’ capacity to become
part of the local society, and very importantly, that determine their ability
to engage in the policy process.
The concept of political opportunity structures has become fashionable in
this respect (Eisinger, 1973; Kitschelt, 1986; Tarrow, 1994; Tilly, 1978; Kriesi
et al., 1995). This is the third strand of research that we consider as important
to arrive at a deeper understanding of the patterns of political participation
and integration of migrants in European cities. This concept has its origin in
the literature on social movements and contentious politics (see Kriesi, 2004
and Meyer, 2004 for reviews). Political opportunities can be defined broadly
as ‘consistent but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national signals to
social or political actors which either encourage or discourage them to use
their internal resources to form social movements’ (Tarrow, 1996: 54). More
specifically, they refer to all those aspects of the political system that affect
the possibilities that challenging groups have to mobilize effectively. Among
such aspects, one can mention the following main dimensions (McAdam,
1996): the relative openness or closure of the institutionalized political system,
the stability or instability of that broad set of elite alignments that typically
undergird a polity, the presence or absence of elite allies, and the state’s
capacity and propensity for repression. All these aspects define ‘options for
collective action, with chances and risks attached to them, which depend on
factors outside the mobilizing group’ (Koopmans, 2004b: 65).
We maintain that the concept of political opportunity structures, originally
crafted to account for social movement and protest activity, can fruitfully
be applied to the study of the political participation and integration of
migrants. In order to do so, however, we need to elaborate it further in
at least three directions, as compared to its traditional usage in the social
movement and contentious politics literature. First, in addition to the more
traditional aspects relating to the general political opportunity structures,
such as the access to the institutionalized political system or the configuration of power, one should also consider more specific features of the
political context that influences in particular the attitudes and behaviours
of migrants, most notably citizenship rights that open or close their access
to the national community (Koopmans et al., 2005). The policies enacted
and implemented by the political authorities of the country of residence
obviously constitute an important aspect of institutional opportunities in
this sense (Bloemraad, 2005; Ireland, 1994; Vermeulen, 2005 and 2006).
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10 Political Opportunities, Social Capital and the Political Inclusion
Second, we need to acknowledge that behaviours are not only constrained
by political institutions, but by discourse matters as well. In other words,
opportunities have both an institutional and a discursive side. The former
aspects refer to the openness or closure of the institutional setting or the
policies enacted by political authorities; while the latter determine which
collective identities and substantive demands have a high likelihood of
gaining visibility in the mass media, resonating with the claims of other collective actors, and achieving legitimacy in the public discourse (Koopmans
et al., 2005).
Finally, while political opportunity theory has looked almost exclusively
to when and how opportunities influence collective mobilization and social
movements, we propose to apply institutional and discursive opportunities
to explain the political participation and integration of individual migrants.
The main idea behind this extension of the original reach of the theory
is that political opportunities structure not just the incentives and disincentives for political mobilization at the group level, but that they also
structure individual action. This is a logical extension of the applicability
of these theories, as it is difficult to see how political opportunities would
impinge on movement mobilization and protest if they do not affect individual participation decisions as well, and other research has successfully
blended already the political opportunity structures approach with the
traditional predictors of political participation in models of individual
behaviour (cf. Leighley, 1995 and 2001; Morales, 2009).
In sum, this book aims to explain the political participation and integration of individual migrants of different national and ethnic groups by
examining the role of their individual characteristics and resources, the
impact of social capital accumulation at the individual and group level, and
the general and specific political opportunities – both institutional and
discursive – that characterize the country and especially the city in which
they live. We now describe in some detail how we conducted the study
and the data on which the volume is based.
The study
All the chapters that are included in this volume employ a large dataset that
is the result of an ambitious effort to study migrants’ political integration
and social capital in several European cities. It is the result of a collective
endeavour that was initiated originally by Meindert Fennema and Jean Tillie
in 2003 with the setting up of a network of European scholars that agreed
to employ the same research design and methods of data collection in each
and all of several European cities. Over the years, some teams were able to
get funding for their projects and others did not, some started earlier – the
Norwegian and Swedish teams, for example – and others had to wait a bit
more to get sufficient funding. In the end, eight teams were able to run
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Laura Morales and Marco Giugni
11
the projects at some point between 2004 and 2008, and the data they have
produced for 10 different European metropolitan cities is what we use in
this volume.
The cities
As we have discussed in previous pages, studying migrant integration in
the urban context is particularly fruitful for several reasons. First, migrants
and their descendants in Europe are overwhelmingly concentrated in cities.
Migrants are often over-represented in cities and urban regions, as these are
places that provide not only better economic perspectives but more diverse
and dynamic social networks and integration possibilities. As a result, an
increasing number of European metropolitan cities contain large foreignorigin communities of between a tenth and a third of their total population.
Yet, not only demographic factors make cities an important focus of research
on the political integration of migrants. In addition most European cities
are relatively autonomous in formulating and implementing policies that
have a substantial impact on migrants’ daily lives, and the local context is
increasingly the one where the integration of migrants is at stake (Rex, 2000;
Penninx et al., 2004; Alexander, 2004).
From this viewpoint, the city is the setting that provides (or denies)
migrants with the general and specific political opportunities, both institutional and discursive, for their political participation and integration. This is
the reason why we selected a number of European metropolitan cities that
reflect a wide variation in terms of the magnitude of immigrant flows,
their timing and their composition. We have chosen to study cities in countries of long-standing immigration – London, Lyon, Oslo, Stockholm,
Zurich and Geneva – as well as cities where immigration is a relatively
recent phenomenon – Barcelona, Budapest, Madrid and Milan.
All the cities studied are centres of large metropolitan regions with strong
economies. The annual per capita GDP generated in these places is usually significantly higher than the national figure (Table 1.1). This attracts migrants
to these regions in larger numbers than the respective national average.
The difference is most striking in the case of London where the proportion
of migrants is more than six times that for Britain as a whole, although
the North London boroughs covered by our analysis (Islington, Camden,
Hackney and Haringey) are especially over-represented by ethnic minority
groups even in comparison with other parts of the city. The proportion of
Londoners who belong to ethnic minority groups is 29 per cent for the
whole city.
In absolute terms, the British and Swiss cities stand out as the ones with
the largest shares of immigrant population, with Budapest at the other end
with barely 3 per cent migrants. Most cities, however, are in intermediate
situations of between 10 and 20 per cent of immigrant population. Another
major difference across the cities studied is related to the dynamic element
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12 Political Opportunities, Social Capital and the Political Inclusion
Table 1.1
Socio-economic indicators of the metropolitan areas
Metropolitan
Region
Population
(million)
Per capita
GDP (in USD,
thousand)
Per capita GDP
of the country
(in USD, thousand)
Percentage
of migrants
7.5
3.9
6.1
5.3
1.7
1.3
1.9
1.7
0.4
0.5
56.8
44.3
38.7
34.9
39.7
n.a.*
46.6
39.3
n.a.*
94.6
34.1
29.5
29.6
29.6
17.9
38.6
34.3
31.7
38.6
52
50.6†
12.5
17.9
17.8
3.2
30.2
20.5
9.4
42.8
25
London⫹
Milan
Madrid
Barcelona
Budapest
Zurich
Stockholm
Lyon
Geneva
Oslo
Source: Population and GDP, OECD Regional Statistics, 2006–2007 (TL3 level); percentage migrants,
respective local government statistics.
⫹
Includes Inner London (East and West), Outer London (East, North East, South, West and North
West).
† Only for the North Inner London boroughs of Islington, Camden, Hackney and Haringey where
the study was conducted.
of migrants’ presence in the city. In Barcelona, London, Madrid and Milan
there have been sharp increases in the inflow of immigrants in the last
decade, which reach up to a fivefold increase in the two Spanish cities. In
contrast, inflows have been less dramatic or have even stagnated in the
other cities.
Our selection of cities has also sought to maximize the range of different
political contexts for migrants in their different dimensions: institutional
and discursive (see Cinalli and Giugni, Chapter 3 in this volume, for more
details). Thus, we have chosen cities in countries that are usually described
as leaning towards pluralist or multicultural models of citizenship (London
in Britain, and Stockholm in Sweden), cities in countries characterized as
following universalist-republican models (Lyon in France), cities in countries thought to approach migrants’ integration from an assimilationistdifferentialist model (Geneva and Zurich in Switzerland, Oslo in Norway),
and a number of cases in countries with less clear-cut models or ones very
much in the making due to their position as new receivers of immigration
(Barcelona and Madrid in Spain, Budapest in Hungary, and Milan in Italy).
Data and methods
The analyses presented in all chapters employ as their core source data from
surveys to representative samples of residents in the respective cities, stratified
by national/ethnic origin. In each city, the surveys include at least two – and
in most cases three – groups of migrant origin, and a control group of
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autochthonous population. The migrant-background groups were selected
on the basis of their country of birth, nationality or ethnicity depending on
the city and the available sampling frames. Thus, in Barcelona, Budapest,
Madrid, Lyon, Milan, Oslo and Stockholm migrants are defined as those
respondents who were either born in one of the foreign countries selected
to define the migrant origin, or with at least one parent foreign-born in the
respective country.2 In Geneva and Zurich, migrants were selected based
on their nationality at the time of sampling, but respondents who were
randomly selected to the autochthonous group that were either born or
had parents of any of the respective foreign backgrounds were reallocated
to their respective migrant groups. In London, respondents were selected on
the basis of the ethnic group to which they ascribe. In all cities we aimed
at obtaining subsamples for each of the groups of between 200 and 300
individuals, so as to be able to compare them adequately. Additionally, in
all cities, a contrast group of autochthonous population of the same sample
size was also interviewed.
In our selection of migrant groups, we had to balance a number of aspects
that were important for the study. First, their population size needed to be
big enough to be able to extract a sample of 300 individuals. Second, we
wanted to include groups of more distant and more recent migration waves.
Third, in all cities we wanted to include at least one group of predominant
Muslim faith. Fourth, migrant groups needed to be ‘relevant’ in each of our
cities, as it made little sense to study groups that were relatively small within
our cities, even if they were the most suited for comparative purposes.
Finally, we aimed at maximizing the comparability of national origins across
cities whenever possible. The resulting selection is shown in Table 1.2.
The surveys were carried in Oslo and Stockholm in 2003–2004 with
national funding and in the other eight cities in 2007–2008 with funding from the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission for
Budapest, London, Lyon, Madrid, Milan and Zurich; and national funding
for Barcelona and Geneva. Hence, the latter eight studies used a questionnaire that overlaps much more than that administered in the two Scandinavian
cities, which share approximately three fourths of the questionnaire with
the other eight cities. In Barcelona, Budapest, London, Madrid, Milan and
Stockholm the interviews were conducted face to face, whereas – due to cost
issues or sampling frame availability – in Geneva, Lyon, Oslo and Zurich
they were undertaken by telephone.3 The sampling strategies had to adapt
to the different availability of registers or lists that covered the population
of interest. Hence, in Barcelona, Budapest, Geneva, Madrid, Oslo, Stockholm
and Zurich nominal individual samples were randomly drawn from the
local population registers.4 In London, focused enumeration within postal
districts was employed. In Milan, a method of random selection within
centres of aggregation was employed for the migrant groups,5 while the
autochthonous group was selected from telephone registers. Finally, in Lyon,
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14 Political Opportunities, Social Capital and the Political Inclusion
Table 1.2
Groups selected in each city
Nationality
Country and
city
Groups of recent
arrival
Groups of longer
settlement
Muslim groups
France
Lyon
Hungary
Budapest
Italy
Milan
Spain
Madrid
Barcelona
Tunisian
Algerian, Moroccan
Chinese, Ethnic
Hungarian
Ecuadorian
Arab/Turkish
mixed group
Filipino
Algerian, Tunisian,
Moroccan
Arab/Turkish mixed
group
Egyptian
Ecuadorian
Ecuadorian
Moroccan
Moroccan
Kosovar
Kosovar
Moroccan and
some of the other
Andean
Moroccan and
some of the other
Andean
Italian, Turkish
Italian
Bangladeshi
Caribbean, Indian
Former Yugoslavia
Turkish
Bangladeshi (some
Indian)
Turkish (some former
Yug.)
Turkish
Switzerland
Zurich
Geneva
UK
London
Norway
Oslo
Sweden
Stockholm
–
Chilean, Turkish
Turkish, Kosovar
Kosovar
Note: groups that are studied in more than one city are shown in italics.
the lack of any available register that includes information about the country
of birth or nationality of the individual or on that of the parents led to a
sample design that proceeded by randomly generating telephone numbers –
within the area code – and screening respondents through a short list of
questions about their country of birth and their ancestry.6
In addition to the survey of individuals, as indicated in Figure 1.1, the
design of the study was structured around a data collection process that
gathered information on the multiple levels of analysis required for testing
the proposed theoretical and analytical model. In all cities, except for Oslo,7
we have additionally collected data through:
• A survey of migrants’ associations that collects information on their
internal organization, goals, membership structure and – very importantly –
their links and collaborations with other migrant and autochthonous
local organizations (such as political parties, trade unions and NGOs).
• The analysis of various policy documents, regulations and interviews
with policy-makers that allow characterizing the institutional political
opportunity structures that migrants face.
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• The coding of claims-making covered by newspapers and which reflect
the dominant public discursive practices with regard to immigration and
immigrant groups in each city, thus allowing us to adequately measure
the discursive opportunity structures for migrants’ political integration
in the local polity.
• The collection of various statistics and official data on the socio-economic
and demographic characteristics of the immigrant population and groups
within each city.
In this book, we make more extensive use of the data collected through
the survey of individual respondents as well as of the information gathered
about the institutional and discursive political opportunity structures. In
two chapters in this volume (5, by Morales and Pilati, and 6, by Strömblad
et al.), we also employ some of the data collected through the survey of
migrant organizations, but we leave the detailed analysis of this latter
dataset for other publications.
In summary, the data that we employ is unique and extremely rich. It is
the first large-scale international study of migrant minorities conducted in
this many cities in Europe. It not only covers individual information, but
also information on migrants’ organizational social capital, and about the
institutional and discursive setting for migrants’ integration into public life.
And, very importantly, it applies the same design and data collection instruments in an unparalleled effort to obtain good quality data that will allow
us to test our theoretical propositions.
Outline of the book
The volume looks at different elements of the theoretical model illustrated
in Figure 1.1 in its various chapters. Chapter 2 by Laura Morales discusses
in some detail the concept of political integration as applied to immigrants and their descendants, and takes issue with the multiple empirical
approaches that one can employ when trying to measure this concept with
survey data. This chapter critically reviews the multiple understandings of
the concept of political integration and related notions, discusses the multiple
underlying tensions in the study of migrants’ political integration, and
illustrates with the survey data of this project the implications of choosing
different conceptual and measurement solutions to those tensions. From
that starting point, all other chapters look at the various aspects that foster
or hinder migrants’ political integration.
In Chapter 3, Manlio Cinalli and Marco Giugni focus on the effect of the
political context. They present the information collected on the institutional and discursive political opportunities that migrants face and study
how they shape migrants’ individual political participation. In Chapter 4,
Amparo González-Ferrer builds on the findings by Cinalli and Giugni and
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16 Political Opportunities, Social Capital and the Political Inclusion
examines whether naturalized immigrants are less inclined to vote than
autochthonous individuals, and how this gap is moderated (or multiplied)
by the opportunities they are afforded to become integrated – in particular,
those related to the legal configuration of residence status.
The following chapters focus on the effect of migrants’ individual and
group-level social capital on their political integration. Laura Morales and
Katia Pilati analyse, in Chapter 5, the role of ‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’
social capital in defining the focus of concern of migrants’ political action
and interest, and how this effect interacts with the political context. In
Chapter 6, Per Strömblad, Gunnar Myrberg and Bo Bengtsson look at the
integrative functions of migrants’ voluntary associations and compare the,
a priori, favourable institutional opportunity structure for ethnic organization and political inclusion of Stockholm with the situation in the other
European cities covered by the study.
In Chapter 7, Laura Morales and Miruna Morariu shift the focus of
attention to the impact of migrants’ transnational engagement and
examine whether the continued link with the country of origin or ancestry is,
as some have suggested, detrimental to their integration in the societies
where they live. Their chapter looks at different forms of transnational
exchanges and pays special attention to the spillover effects of these
engagements.
In Chapter 8, Gunnar Myrberg and Jon Rogstad compare in some detail
two cases that are often considered as relatively similar in many aspects
relevant to migrants’ political integration but not to their integration
‘philosophy’: Oslo and Stockholm. In so doing, they seek to identify the
similarities and differences in the patterns of political engagement of immigrants and their descendants across the two contexts, as well as the factors
that can account for the gaps in engagement with respect to the respective
autochthonous populations.
The last three empirical chapters focus on various aspects of migrants’ attitudes, orientations and belief systems. Chapter 9 by, Eva Anduiza and Josep
San Martín, analyses the gap in political efficacy and confidence of migrant
populations for a selection of cities and groups. Their chapter shows that in
not all cases and all contexts are migrants less trusting of political institutions than the autochthonous population, and that the common predictors
of efficacy and confidence operate differently for the autochthonous and
the migrant populations.
In Chapter 10, Nina Eggert and Marco Giugni study how religiosity is
an important driving force in migrants’ political participation. But they
also examine the ways in which the political context mediates the relation
between migrants’ religiosity and political engagement. In particular, their
chapter looks at the effect that the ways in which local authorities deal with
cultural and religious differences mediate the connection between religion
and politics.
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Chapter 11 by Ranji Devadason analyses the patterns of identification
with the political community of immigrants and their descendants by
focusing on place attachment. Using the case of London as the comparative
standpoint of a multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan city, she looks at how different contexts shape the feelings of belonging to ethnic and religious categories, as well as to the neighbourhood and the cities were they live.
Finally, in the concluding chapter we summarize and discuss the main
findings generated by the study and presented throughout the volume and
we extract the main conclusion with regard to how European societies and
policy-makers can more effectively promote the integration of immigrants
and their offspring into the political life of the places where they live.
Notes
* We thank Bo Bengtsson, Abigail Fisher Williamson and Dirk Jacobs for their detailed
comments on previous versions of this chapter.
1. For brevity, throughout the book we will refer to immigrants and their children
as ‘migrants’, thus including first and second generations of people of foreign
origin.
2. In the case of Lyon, a small number of cases of individuals whose grandparents
were of Maghrebi origin were also included in the sample.
3. In Milan, the autochthonous group was interviewed by telephone.
4. In Barcelona and Madrid, due to problems of updating of the local register and
of response rates, part of the sample of the autochthonous group was selected
through random routes, and a small proportion of the samples for the migrant
groups were selected through the spatial sampling procedures employed also
in Milan. Multiple analyses of the Spanish data have shown that the sampling
method has not significant effect on the main outcome variables of interest to
this study. In Geneva and Zurich, the sampling frame for the autochthonous
subsample was the telephone register, which is the common sampling frame
used in Switzerland for surveys to the general population. In Budapest, due to
problems of coverage of the official population registers, for the Chinese and the
mixed Arab/Turkish groups the initial samples of 100 individuals were complemented with individuals selected through the snowball method with more than
25 starting points (31 for 249 Chinese subjects, and 27 for 286 additional 286
respondents).
5. The sample is designed to achieve representativeness by proceeding to randomly
select within two different levels of sampling. The first level requires the identification of a certain number of local immigrant meeting places distributed across
the municipality. This level of the sampling refers to the local centres or places of
aggregation (institutions, places of worship, entertainment, care centres, meeting
points, and so on). The second level of sampling refers to the individuals sampled
in the various local centres. The universe of immigrants present at the time of the
survey, thus, is made up of a list of H statistical units, each of which represents a
set of contacts with a local centre (Blangiardo, 1999).
6. The effort and cost of this method should not be underestimated. Even if the
precision of the area codes allows targeting specific neighbourhoods within Lyon,
67,938 phone numbers had to be called to obtain a sample of 1,100 individuals.
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18 Political Opportunities, Social Capital and the Political Inclusion
This means that nearly everyone was called across the selected areas. Targeting in
the areas of Vénissieux and Vaulx-en-Vélin was particularly difficult since all the
existing telephone numbers were exhausted at a relatively early stage. Numbers
were not randomly ‘generated’, instead lists of all existing phone numbers were
obtained from private companies that can provide all available phone numbers for
any given area. The selection included only landlines.
7. In Oslo, only the individual survey was conducted
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