Social Capital Political Participation And Migration In Europe

How can European societies more effectively promote the active engagement of immigrants and their children in the political and civic life of the countries where they live? This book examines the effect of migrants' individual attributes and resources, their social capital and the political opportunities on their political integration.

Proceedings of a seminar held in November 1997

This unique book offers an empirical assessment of how social and political involvement relates to theories of citizenship and democracy and is a companion volume to Citizenship and Involvement in European Democracies.

This comparative study examines what kinds of societal forces shape European relationships towards democratic political life in contemporary Europe. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey (ESS), the book develops a theoretical perspective on the relationship between social structure and democracy and links this to research on social capital and political behaviour. The authors explore the impact of individual social characteristics on a broad range of the Europeans’ political attitudes and behaviours. They investigate how the social position of the individuals in the European societies contributes to the explanation of the national and cross-national patterns of political engagement, addressing trust in the social and political environment, life satisfaction, party preferences and attitudes towards migration and migrants. Providing detailed descriptions of the similarities and differences among the various European publics at the beginning of the 21st century, Society and Democracy in Europe will be of strong interest to students and scholars of European politics, political participation and political sociology.

There are relatively few books that provide comparative analysis of European cities in relation to immigrants and political participation. This fresh and insightful volume analyzes how the presence of immigrants is perceived in politics, how this affects their status and how far minorities are able to (politically) participate in European cities.

This book seeks to explore the potentialities of strengthening a new field of research within migration and diversity studies, that of immigrant incorporation in political parties. The point of departure of all the contributions to this volume is that there is what we call a ‘diversity gap’ between political parties as public representative organisations and diversity dynamics in democratic societies. Exploring the current strategies of political parties developing first conceptual frameworks, theoretical foundations and empirical hypothesis and approaches, this book examines case studies from four European countries: Germany, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This book examines the role of civil society organizations in several advanced European democracies: Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Specifically the book focuses on how voluntary organizations contribute to civic and democratic health and assesses the impact of different organizational types on social capital. Building on Citizenship and Involvement in European Democracies and Social Capital and Associations in Europe (2007), this volume seeks to widen and deepen the analysis by introducing new data on activists and combining it with the organizational data and the population data. It evaluates the impact of the organizational context on individual activity profiles and attitudes and values of activists and provides a unique assessment on the contribution that voluntary associations make to civil and democratic society. Part One deals with the consequences of associational involvement for several attitudinal and behavioural orientations and Part Two expands the scope of the effects of voluntary associations towards European attitudes. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of civil society, democracy, political participation, politics and sociology.

At a time when immigration and ethnic relations issues are hotly disputed across Europe, and challenged by minorities and xenophobes, the explicit aim of this collection is to present substantive cross-national contributions on this new quality of contentious politics. That European countrieshave dealt with the integration of minorities in different ways, often bound up in conceptions of nationhood and citizenship traditions, indicates that research will benefit from more systematic cross-national comparisons. Secondly, the new contentiousness of immigration and ethnic relationspolitics points to a need for more systematic linkages between policy analyses and the public conflicts that are mobilized by xenophobic, minority, and anti-racist movements. Thirdly, although the topics of the extreme right and ethnic minorities have been largely dealt with as distinct fields, agreater cross-thematic conceptualisation is necessary The book divides into four parts. In the first, authors offer conceptual approaches to migration and ethnic relations politics drawing strongly on cross-national observations. Parts two and three are empirical analyses based on a method of systematic cross-national comparison. Whereas theinstitutionalised aspects of immigration and ethnic relations politics are the topic of part two, the third focuses more on the public contentious dimensions. Finally, in light of the important claims that nation-states are no longer the significant framework of reference for politics in aglobalizing world, the contributions to part four address the emergence of the transnational level of political authority and its implications for national and sub-national politics, and challenges by social movements.