Coping with a changing integration policy context: American state policies and their effects on immigrant political engagement
Where and Why Immigrants Intend to Naturalize: The Interplay Between Acculturation Strategies and Integration Policies
Via naturalization procedures, immigrants have the opportunity to acquire rights and duties limited to nationals. Yet little is known about acculturative contexts and naturalization motives underlying immigrants' naturalization intentions. Employing a large sample of first-generation immigrants in Switzerland (N = 3928) and a multilevel approach, we articulated individual acculturation strategies and cantonal integration policies to explain naturalization intentions and underlying motives. Results at the individual level showed that assimilated immigrants report the highest intentions to naturalize, followed by integrated, and lastly by separated immigrants. Motives underlying naturalization intentions also differed as a function of acculturation strategies. Whereas integrated and assimilated immigrants reported higher symbolic motives than separated immigrants, the latter reported the highest level of instrumental motives. A cross-level interaction qualified results at the individual level. Indeed, the gap between integrated and separated immigrants was more pronounced under inclusive integration policies. Accordingly, integrated immigrants' naturalization intentions increased the more integration policies were inclusive, whereas this was not the case among assimilated and separated immigrants. Overall, our findings cast a positive light on inclusive integration policies as contextual affordances to overcome barriers to naturalization and encourage migration scholars to consider the broader political context in which immigrant acculturation is embedded.
How effective are integration policy reforms? The case of asylum-related migrants
The integrative force of political institutions? Direct democracy and voter turnout across ethnic and nativity groups
Much has been written on the positive effect of direct democracy (initiatives, referendums) on voter turnout. However, we have limited knowledge about potential differential effects on voters belonging to various ethnic groups. The paper argues that depending on a group’s responsiveness to the political context, direct democracy can (dis-)integrate voters (from) into the electorate. Empirical analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) voting supplement survey data, together with data on the absolute use of direct democracy across US states, corroborates this theoretical expectation, however lending more support for the disintegrating assumption. Frequent direct democratic elections further widen the negative voting gap between first-generation Asian voters and voters living in the US for three generations or longer, whereas they tend to diminish this voting gap for first-generation Hispanic voters. The disintegrative pattern for first-generation Asian voters remains even significant when excluding California from the state sample, yet not the integrative tendency for first-generation Hispanics. Additional analyses using alternative measures of direct democracy and voting, and applying statistical adjustments to address causality concerns, confirm the robustness of these findings, which shed light on the so-far underexplored (dis-)integrative potential of political institutions.