While research documents that some migrants leave their country of origin for political reasons, we do not know how the political factors in the host-country matter to explain immigrants’ (im-)mobility behaviours after an initial migration. Addressing this gap, this study explores noncitizens’ (im-)mobility responses to regional integration policies. Building on the evidence that inclusive policies […]
Objective: Understand the COVID-19-related health literacy of socioeconomically vulnerable migrant groups.Methods: We conducted a survey available in 8 languages among 2,354 members of the target population in Switzerland in 2020. We measured health literacy in four dimensions (finding, understanding, evaluating and applying health information) and assessed adherence to official recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic.Results: Most […]
Growing social inequalities represent a major concern associated with the Digital Revolution. The article tackles this issue by exploring how welfare regulations and redistribution policies can be rethought in the age of digital capitalism. It focuses on the history and enduring crisis of social citizenship rights in their connection with technological changes, in order to […]
Spatial mobility is considered a valuable resource for social mobility. Yet, we still have an insufficient understanding of the extent to which and under what conditions geographical movement across national borders represents an asset for social advancement. Addressing this research gap, we offer a theoretical contribution to the fields of transnationalism, migration/mobility, and social geography. […]
Drawing upon case studies from Cape Town, ‘Africa’s smartest city’, this article proposes three theses on ‘urban-digital citizenship’. First, we suggest that urban-digital citizenship is defined by borders which operate: i) at a socio-spatial level, through the unequal distribution of digital infrastructures across the urban space; ii) through the algorithmic techniques of monitoring, profiling, and […]
Returnee entrepreneurs are often represented in migration and development discourses as agents of development. This assumes that they acquire valuable socio-economic resources abroad which help them to create successful businesses upon return. However, we have scant knowledge of the impact of the geopolitical context on returnee entrepreneurs or their coping strategies. Latin American returnees in […]
Across Western democracies, immigration has become one of the most polarizing and salient issues, with public discourses and individual attitudes often characterized by misperceptions. This condition undermines people’s ability to develop informed opinions on the matter and runs counter to the ideal of deliberative democracy. Yet, our understanding of what makes immigration so prone to […]
The health of undocumented immigrants is an important concern in most societies. However, there is no conclusive evidence that inclusive health care policies lead to better outcomes for this group of the population. The aim of this study is to analyse whether there is an association between inclusive health care policies and the mortality patterns […]
A critical barrier to generating cumulative knowledge in political science and related disciplines is the inability of researchers to observe the results from the full set of research designs that scholars have conceptualized, implemented, and analyzed. For a variety of reasons, studies that produce null findings are especially likely to be unobserved, creating biases in […]
This paper deals with non-citizen voting rights from the perspective of grassroots initiatives that campaign for more inclusive local voting rights for migrants. It looks at three initiatives in three European cities with a growing foreign population: in Basel (Switzerland), Brussels (Belgium), and Freiburg (Germany). All three initiatives address authorities with the need to increase […]
Although acculturation is considered a mutual process, no measure assesses attitudes toward mutual acculturation. Through a novel four-dimensional measurement, this study addresses this research gap by assessing attitudes toward minority and majority acculturation and its relation to psychological adjustment for immigrant-background minority and non-immigrant majority adolescents in public secondary schools in three European countries: in […]
Infamously, Rawls assumed a democratic society to be “a complete and closed social system,” in that “entry into it is only by birth and exit from it is only by death.” Since the beginning of the present millennium, however, debates about the ethical issues related to immigration have been prominent. In this context, these methodological […]
Switzerland implemented an immigration quota system to manage the inflow of immigration between 1970 and 2002. This paper adopts a difference-in-difference strategy taking advantage of subnational variations in the implementation of the quota system to evaluate this migration policy. An instrument variable of antiimmigration attitudes is used to address the potential endogeneity issue. The author […]
Paperwork has always been a central part of bureaucratic work. Over the last few years, bureaucratic procedures have become increasingly standardised and digitalised. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork within welfare offices in Switzerland and Belgium, we reflect on the way evidence is constructed within social policy and cases built for or against noncitizen welfare […]
The paper analyses, how a low level of cultural distance and a strong social and cultural integration affects second-generation immigrants’ labour market chances. We address this question by means of a survey experiment carried out with human resources professionals in Switzerland. First, we analyse whether job applicants are evaluated more negatively if their parents stem […]
We develop a minority influence approach to multilevel intergroup research and examine whether country-level minority norms shape majority members? perceptions of discrimination. Defining minority norms via actual minority discrimination and political participation, we hypothesized that in national contexts with greater minority experiences of discrimination and greater minority political participation, majority perceptions of discrimination should be […]
Civil conflicts push a significant number of people out of their home countries, as the recent refugee crisis has shown. But what if emigration itself worked as a pacifying force and, by opening their borders, developed countries could alleviate conflict back home? Using a theory driven instrumental variable approach and country level panel data of […]
The European Union put in place instruments for the deportation of foreigners that gained much importance. This article describes the multiplicity and diversity of these instruments. To analyse them more clearly, it distinguishes three types: legal, organisational and technological. The article equally points to the increasing relevance of technological tools, especially the use of biometrics. […]
In the context where immigration divides the political space of Western societies, perceived social polarization as an explanation of collective action is surprisingly understudied in contemporary social psychology. We hypothesize that the more people perceive polarization, the more they will engage in collective action in line with their attitudes. Moreover, this effect should be explained […]
This research investigated whether ingroup norm moderates the effect of positive or prosocial interactions on the understanding of intergroup prosocial behaviors. Among four experiments in three different cultural samples (U.S. Americans, Kosovan Serbs, and Kosovan Albanians; N = 808), results showed that participants attributed fewer prosocial motives and reported less willingness to accept help when […]
The present research investigated whether learning that an outgroup humanizes the ingroup (i.e., meta-humanization) enhances how people react to intergroup prosocial behaviours and their willingness to engage in intergroup contact. In three experiments conducted in two cultural contexts (Kosovo and North Macedonia; n = 601), we manipulated meta-humanization by informing participants that their ingroup is perceived to […]
This article employs a mobility lens to investigate the ways in which membership is organised in a peripheral(ised) place. We show that adopting such a lens makes it possible to tackle important pitfalls in migration studies – an urban and sedentary bias and national- and ethnicity-based epistemologies. By including different types of transnational, national and […]
Active labour market policies (ALMPs) are widely diffused measures aiming to re-integrate jobseekers into the labour market. Despite their crucial role in acting as gatekeepers to employment, the literature scarcely considers the employer’s perspective of these measures. We analysed whether and how employers consider ALMP participation in the hiring process as a signal that helps […]
With the arrival of vaccines against the novel coronavirus in late 2020, the issue of how vaccines should be distributed and which groups should be prioritized has become salient. We study popular attitudes toward the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines and how these have changed over the course of the pandemic in Switzerland, drawing on data […]
A large body of research has demonstrated that intergroup contact is a powerful tool for reducing prejudice among majority group members. Yet, research among minority group members has revealed a more complex picture. The present contribution advances recent research on sedative effects of intergroup contact on support for ethnic activism, by investigating how identity dynamics […]
This article problematizes the concept of highly skilled migrants through an analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews in Switzerland. Current political discourse classifies foreigners differently according to their country of origin and skill level. Existing legislation prioritizes immigrants from the European Economic Area and is very restrictive towards Third-country nationals. By examining the […]
This article explores the story of Einar, a Faroese man who always lived within a 500-meters radius on the island of Suðuroy, who never felt “stuck” or “immobile” in the literal sense of the word. Studies have shown that staying is a process, as much as mobility; yet while mobility studies mainly show that imagination […]
With this paper we want to contribute to the debate on the usage of vocational training as a tool to promote the integration of disadvantaged groups. We focus in particular on programmes that target refugees and highlight the organisational and coordination challenges that must be addressed in order to develop such programmes. Relying on knowledge […]
Several academic fields study how immigrants choose their place of residence when moving to, or within destination countries. Existing studies, however, focus on isolated factors, and we do not know whether political factors matter once we have accounted for well established determinants. This paper examines the extent to which political factors, such as voting rights […]
In recent decades, we have witnessed the diffusion of policy diffusion studies across many sub-disciplines of political science. Four mechanisms of policy diffusion–learning, competition, emulation and coercion–have become widely accepted as explanations for how policymaking processes and policy outcomes in one polity influence those in other polities. After pointing to major shortcomings of this inductively […]
