This study builds on the well-known civic voluntarism model of political participation. By doing this, we contribute to a political sociology of participation by refining the role of socialization in political engagement. We suggest that the action repertoires of young people engaging in politics can be narrower or broader owing to their previous embeddedness in certain social settings, which act as spheres of socializing practices. We focus more specifically on three socializing spheres: educational (schools), recreational (social clubs), and civic (community organizations). Our analysis, covering nine European countries, largely confirms our expectations. We find that active engagement in these spheres of socializing practices leads to a broader range of political activities in young people’s action repertoires. This holds in particular for the civic sphere. The findings provide a fresh look at the role played by socializing spheres, shifting the focus from the dichotomy between participation versus non-participation to an analysis of the breadth of participation.
European citizens continue to engage in solidarity activities in support of vulnerable groups within and beyond their own countries. Many of these organised practices of transnational solidarity provide research with important insights into the features and conditions of organisational forms of support. This article makes use of a unique dataset of transnational solidarity organisations in eight European countries during a period of economic recession and immigration crisis, and aims to empirically describe the different forms and types of solidarity prevalent within three different organisational sectors. It strives to identify the organisational features explaining the elective affinities between organisational forms and solidarity approaches. The empirical analysis validates that organisational traits and types matter when favouring vertical and/or horizontal forms of support towards vulnerable groups. Findings corroborate the relevance of professionalisation, aims, and values, in addition to action repertoires to explain organisational profiles and collective approaches to solidarity-based practices.
Despite compelling literature, research has so far failed to provide substantive empirical evidence on the relationship between individual preferences on the inclusion of immigrants into institutionalized forms of solidarity and migration incorporation regimes. I argue that, apart from individual factors and welfare state generosity, citizenship models shape citizen’s attitudes on immigrant social rights. Concretely, I examine the effect of the civic and cultural dimensions of the models of citizenship relative to attitudes of unconditional institutional solidarity toward immigrants and welfare chauvinism. The results show that individual attitudes about welfare eligibility of migrants differ among sociodemographic characteristics, political economic orientations, and social depositions of deservingness but at the same time yield from the cultural barriers to the access of immigrants to the political community.
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