Immigrants from Muslim-majority countries and their descendants have constituted growing minorities throughout western Europe for the past half-century and have been the focus of intense debate over social problems, cultural difference and security threats. Governments have employed varying measures to integrate immigrants, often focusing on economic benchmarks, but integration policy-makers and practitioners increasingly believe that deeper civic engagement is an essential factor for long-term societal stability. What drives civic identity and participation among young immigrant minorities? While much scholarship exists on participation or identity in single settings, we have little concrete, comparative knowledge to guide policy, practice and social science on identity formation and political inclusion in diverse societies.
This project examines civic integration through primary survey research among young immigrant minorities and their ethnic-majority peers in Denmark and Sweden, two otherwise quite similar states with divergent integration and citizenship policies. It examines whether a liberal national citizenship policy, open integration rhetoric, and higher levels of national and social inclusion (as are expected in Sweden as compared to the more restrictive Denmark) are key to increasing civic identification and participation among immigrant minorities, or whether more restrictive policies and definitions of national identity drive immigrants to integrate at a higher rate by pushing them to build language competence and social contacts.
The project will survey minorities and their ethnic-majority peers at high schools, trade and business colleges, adult-education programs and language schools for foreigners in the two largest cities of both Denmark and Sweden, and thus will collect information on whether they identify with the larger civic community and participate in that community's political life. To examine what drives these outcomes, the project will also gather and analyze information on beliefs on the accessibility of citizenship and social inclusion, on religious and ethnic identity, on individual background and on levels of social trust and minority-community engagement.
The survey analysis will be supported by in-depth interviews with immigrants, minority leaders and policy makers to examine national identity concepts in the two countries and how the working national models have influenced minority civic engagement. Information from the survey will be analyzed to explore how national settings interact with group identity and individual characteristics to influence identification and participation, and these results will be interpreted with help from the interviews.
This work has potential to inform academic, policy and public debates on integration in Europe, the United States and other immigrant-receiving countries. It will deepen knowledge of how integration policies and national definitions of who belongs are actually affecting civic integration, and will provide a baseline for other cross-national studies on civic integration in the region. Additionally, its investigation of how minority and national identities interact promises better understanding not only of immigrant identity in Scandinavia but of how social scientists can and should study identity empirically. The project's empirical and theoretical results will be communicated to policymakers and integration practitioners in Sweden and Denmark, as well as to cross-national integration research consortia in Europe and the United States. As such, the project will contribute to cross-national research on identity and integration, and has the potential to help shape citizenship policy, political inclusion practices and integration debates in immigrant-receiving societies.
In a time where our societies are growing more diverse and multicultural, our knowledge of what brings young people of immigrant background to identify with and engage the national civic community is still limited. This doctoral dissertation project in political science investigated how quite different levels of openness and inclusion towards immigrant minorities in Denmark and Sweden (two otherwise broadly similar countries) are actually impacting young minorities' perceptions of their inclusion in society, and whether these feelings in turn play a role in their levels of national identification and political engagement (in comparison to the effects of factors like ethnic background, education, income or employment). While using two Scandinavian national settings, the study builds our knowledge of how such factors impact processes of civic integration that may be argued to be increasingly important to many societies, including the United States. NSF funds enabled the project to conduct primary survey and interview research among nationally representative groups of young people of both immigrant ethnic-majority background in the two countries. Analysis of the collected data reveal several key findings. First, on how minority perceptions in the two countries differ: That immigrant-minority perceptions of citizenship availability to their ethnic groups (and religious groups, especially Muslims) are not so different as the actual national policies would have us expect, primarily due to low levels of knowledge among many minorities about those policies. That political and social inclusion perceptions do differ significantly in the two countries, with young minorities in Sweden having siginificantly more positive perceptions than their counterparts in Sweden. On what drives national identification and political participation: That the minorities' ideas of politicians' attitudes toward their ethnic and religious groups matter much more for their national identification in Denmark, where group issues seem to be more salient in general, than in Sweden; Surprisingly, that such perceptions of group political inclusion also matter more for minority men's identification levels than they do for women's; That all three inclusion dimensions--minorities' ideas of how citizenship, politician attitudes and social inclusion are extended to them personally--matter for national identification; the greatest of these is social inclusion (how equal they see themselves to be seen as and treated in daily life and in general). That politician attitudes, especially, matter for minorities' level of trust in political instituions, and for their sense of whether they can have an impact in government decisions ('political efficacy'). That national identfiication, political efficacy and trust in political institutions all have positive impacts on whether minorities vote and intend to vote in the future; However, the impacts are somewhat different on less conventional forms of political action--here, national identificaiton and political efficacy have a positive impact, while trust in institutions has a negative impact -- that is, minorities are more likely to take part in such political action if they identify with the nation and feel they can have an impact, but have low levels of trust in political institutions. Similar dynamics hold for ethnic-majority young people, except that for them, national identification is not very salient for whether they participate politically. These findings constitute the beginning, rather than the end, of a line of research that must be continued in the United States and in other settings, focusing on when and how individual, ethnic-group and national factors influence young minorities' identities and political engagement.
