Associational membership and political involvement among ethnic minority groups in Brussels

Associational Involvement, Social Capital and the Political Participation of Ethno-Religious Minorities: The Case of Muslims in Switzerland

“…1 Our focus on Muslims is aimed to explore the interplay of the religious and the ethnic dimensions of social capital and therefore to dig deeper into the role of social capital for the political participation of immigrants. Recent works on the political participation of immigrants in Europe have focused on the role of associational involvement and social capital (Berger, Galonska, and Koopmans 2004;Eggert and Giugni 2010;Jacobs, Phalet, and Swyngedouw 2004;Morales and Giugni 2011;Tillie 2004;Togeby 2004). This body of works posits a link between involvement in voluntary associations and the political participation of immigrants.…”

Politics Matters: Dynamics of Inter-organizational Networks among Immigrant Associations

“…In this sense, the 2-star effect seems particularly relevant. In the longer term, we intend to relate the dynamics of these networks to the political participation of the corresponding communities, in order to test existing hypotheses on the impact of ethnic social capital on political participation [3,4].…”

“…In the paper, four structural effects were considered as relevant for interlock formation (Table 3): the basic outdegree effect, density; simple and double interlocks, labeled 2-star and 4-cycle, respectively; and an intermediate structure termed 3-path. The resulting four effects have distinctly different meanings: while density is a "baseline" expressing the tendency of associations of acquiring a new director 6 , 2-star corresponds to the tendency of forming an interlock, which may indicate an underlying social connection among the new director and members of the board, or reflect a strategy of the two boards; and 4-cycle amounts to adding a second interlock to an existing one, which is interpreted by [6] as a stronger clue of peer referral : the fact that at least one of the directors sits already on both boards implies that he knows already all directors involved, and may suggest that one of his colleagues from the first board joins the second one, thus doubling the 4 Comparing different effects on the same data set is instead not trivial, as the magnitude of an effect is not a relevant index of its actual impact on network evolution, which also depends on the magnitude of the associated effect function. What matters in interpreting the results is the sign of significant effects.…”

“…In his famous work on the causal relationship between "bridging" social capital (associational life), trust, and civic behavior, Putnam [10] did not investigate the structural aspect of such networks, leaving the question of its relevance unstated. Recently, the relationship between associational life and political participation of ethnic minority groups in Europe has been investigated, obtaining useful insights, yet without reaching uniform conclusions [4,13,14]. In this line of work, simple structural properties of the network of interlocking directorates among ethnic associations have been used as a "proxy" of the social capital of the corresponding minority group.…”

Immigrant Associations, Integration and Identity : Angolan, Brazilian and Eastern European Communities in Portugal

“…6. Jacobs et al (2004) point out the following four key limitations of the arguments of Fennema and Tillie (2001): first, attention remains limited to 'ethnic' social capital (embedding in ethnic associations) without taking into account forms of cross-cultural social capital (embedded in mixed and more mainstream organisations) and the relationship between these two types of social capital; second, potential differential effects according to the type of organisations are disregarded; third, the possibility of gender differences is not taken into account; and lastly, there is no attention is paid to the importance of forms of social and cultural capital. 7.…”