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Research in the United States has emphasized the importance of anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic hostility to galvanize shared identities and a sense of linked fate that is electorally mobilized around the pan-ethnic Latino identity. With survey data on the electoral behavior of South American immigrants in the United States and Spain spanning a decade (2006-2018), this article gauges how critical hostility is for electoral mobilization. The findings suggest that—despite very different institutional settings, hostility levels, elite strategies, and political mobilization patterns—South American immigrants are forging remarkably similar patterns of political preferences and engagement across both sides of the Atlantic. The overtime and comparative perspective calls into question that hostility is the main driving force behind Latino electoral participation and block voting in the United States and prompts greater attention to the socioeconomic status of Latinos and mobilization by political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a systematic assessment of various methods to position political parties on immigration, a policy domain that does not necessarily overlap with left–right and is characterized by varying salience and issue complexity. Manual and automated coding methods drawing on 283 party manifestos are compared – manual sentence-by-sentence coding using a conventional codebook, manual coding using checklists, automated coding using Wordscores, Wordfish and keywords. We also use expert surveys and the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), covering the main parties in Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, between 1993 and 2013. We find high levels of consistency between expert positioning, manual sentence-by-sentence coding and manual checklist coding and poor or inconsistent results with the CMP, Wordscores, Wordfish and the dictionary approach. An often-neglected method – manual coding using checklists – offers resource efficiency with no loss in validity or reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous scholarship has reported contradictory results regarding the impact of involvement by immigrant-origin individuals (IOIs) in ethnic organizations on political participation. In this article, we assess the effect of involvement in different types of organizations (ethnic, pan-immigrant and native) on participation in various types of political activities. We use cross-national micro-data from a population survey undertaken in 2004–2008 to IOIs in nine European cities. Our findings indicate that ethnic organizations perform an integrative function for IOIs in the political sphere, but they mainly affect participation linked to immigration-related issues concerning specific ethnic groups and IOIs. Moreover, most effects of involvement in ethnic organizations on the different types of political participation examined are similar in closed and in open political opportunity structures (POS). We only find evidence that involvement in ethnic organizations depresses conventional political action in open POS settings while it increases political action in closed POS settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine how different formal citizenship regimes fare in achieving the political inclusion of immigrants and their children by looking at voting turnout in local elections. We analyse survey data from four European cities that grant voting rights to foreigners but are located in countries with contrasting rules for access to formal citizenship. Local voting gaps are larger where citizenship rules are more restrictive, which suggests that citizenship regimes have long-lasting effects on political inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the relevance of network embeddedness and social capital in allowing migrants' associations to gain political capital and access to policy making in the cities of Barcelona and Madrid With data from a survey of migrants' associations in both locations, we examine the degree to which embeddedness in networks of links with other migrants' associations and with autochihonous Spanish civil society organizations are consequential for the inclusion of migrants' organizations in policy-making processes. The results show that migrants' organizational social capital is critical in facilitating their intermediation function vis a vis political institutions and decision makers, above and beyond their access to financial and human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]