Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: What Drives Civic Integration? Analyzing Immigrant Identity and Participation in Denmark and Sweden

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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.