Immigrant political mobilisation in Portugal and Italy

Abstract

Political mobilisation of immigrants has been a subject of research throughout Europe with different sorts of approach. In this thesis, we make a revision of the extensive literature on the issue. Several perspectives have been developed that we use to frame our research design. We use an institutional approach to analyse immigrant and pro-immigrant political mobilisation in two countries: Portugal and Italy. We use two empirical sets of data to give a general overview of immigrant political mobilisation, on the one hand, and in-depth analysis of political mobilisation with different sorts of actors, on the other hand. We use a political opportunities structures approach for each country, analysing the immigration and immigrant laws in the nineties and beginning of the current decade. We continue with the anaysis of two immigrant groups for each country, comparing political mobilisation forms, frames, identities and repertoires of action promoted by those immigrant groups. This sort of case study approach allows discerning differences and comon aspects among both groups. We finally analyse the civil society structure for each country with the intend to establish the kind of civil society structure and how each state configuration conditions the political mobilisation of proimmigrant actors. Our main findings outline the importance of both factors: the political opportunity structures and immigrant group characteristics. We find different paths to political mobilisation for each immigrant group in each country.