Empowering Members of Ethnic Organisations: Tracing the Political Integration Potential of Immigrant Associations in Stockholm

The voluminous participation literature notwithstanding, knowledge is still scarce on how voluntary associations more precisely provide their members with politically significant human and social capital. This article focuses on the capacities of immigrant organisations to promote the political integration of ethnic minority members. Analysing a unique dataset, based on face-to-face interviews with representatives of 106 organisations of four different immigrant groups in Greater Stockholm, the study empirically investigates what the authors refer to as an association's ' political integration potential ' (PIP) – the possibility of a given ethnic association to promote the inclusion of its members in the political community of the host society. As elements of PIP, the article examines associational-level political activity as well as support and mobilisation of individual members, and analyses how the former may be induced by the latter. Furthermore, the article tries to explain why some types of organisations do better than others in these respects. It finds that size and diversification of associations have an important impact on PIP, thus explaining observed differences between associations of the ethnic categories included in this study.