When immigrants are segregated, their integration can be hindered because they are cut off from social networks that contain valuable sources of cultural capital that could otherwise help them adapt to their new home. Therefore, the communities that immigrants live in can have important consequences for their integration. Some neighborhoods, as a function of demographic composition or urban design, encourage inter-ethnic interaction, while others inhibit it. In this chapter, I examine two neighborhoods known to house a group identified as vaccine hesitant—Somali immigrants in northern Stockholm—in order to provide insights into the compositional and built environment factors that may lead to this group’s deviation from the norm, signaling low levels of integration. I show that the group is quite residentially segregated and also argue that the community may be undergoing a transition into a ghetto, which would further impede integration.

This research note provides a case study illustrating cross-national trends reported in recent research on the radical right. Using party manifesto data, we examine Denmark from 1973- 2011 and find that the radical right has moved toward economic leftism and social conservatism, creating a cleavage within the party family over time. Furthermore, nationalist claims increasingly distinguish the Danish radical right from other party families, including their radical right predecessors.

Aim:

Country-of-birth data contained in registers are often aggregated to create broad ancestry group categories. We examine how measures of residential segregation vary according to levels of aggregation.

Method:

We use Swedish register data to calculate pairwise dissimilarity indices from 1990 to 2012 for ancestry groups defined at four nested levels of aggregation: (1) micro-groups containing 50 categories, (2) meso-groups containing 16 categories, (3) macro-groups containing six categories and (4) a broad Western/non-Western binary.

Results:

We find variation in segregation levels between ancestry groups that is obscured by data aggregation.

Conclusions:

This study demonstrates that the practice of aggregating country-of-birth statistics in register data can hinder the ability to identify highly segregated groups and therefore design effective policy to remedy both intergroup and intergenerational inequalities.

New right-wing extremist parties all over Europe have been described as adopting a master framethat combines xenophobia and anti-political establishment populism (Rydgren 2004). In Sweden the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD) have emerged as the dominating newright-wing extremist party that was able to more than double their share of votes from the 2010 tothe 2014 parliamentary elections (2010: 5.7%, 2014: 12.9%). We conducted a vignette study in arepresentative sample of the Swedish population shortly before and after the 2014 nationalelections, which helps us to analyse the social distance between the majority population and theMuslim minority. We are explicitly taking into account the prevalence of right-wing populistattitudes in the population and their support for SD in the 2010 and 2014 elections. Our resultsshow that; (1) anti-minority attitudes (held by 36% of the population) but not anti-establishmentattitudes (held by 37% of the population) predict increased social distance to Muslims and eventowards persons that are only presented as having a foreign name, (2) SD voters hold drasticallymore negative views about Muslims than does any other voter group, (3) the vote for SD is purelydriven by anti-minority sentiments, not anti-establishmentarism. In conclusion, while SD mightpresent its cause in the language of anti-establishment populism and their voters mightlegitimise their voting choice by this principle, SD voters’ intentions are fundamentallyrooted in xenophobia.

Polish farmers became politically contentious after democratization in 1989, despite their minimal involvement in the Solidarity movement. I test the effectiveness of social movement theories in explaining this phenomenon by examining frequency and intensity of protest from 1980-1995. I find that grievance models have little explanatory power, political opportunity accounts for the frequency of protest, and resource mobilization offers insight into both frequency and intensity of protests. Supplementing existing theories, I offer qualitative evidence that development programs designed to restructure agricultural cooperatives created mobilizing structures. The reforms were intended to help family farmers adapt to the new market economy, but because most protests targeted liberalization policies, I conclude that in their short-term success, development agencies inadvertently subsidized the cost of collection action against their long-term goals.

Collective action lies at the heart of any vibrant civil society because civic engagement requires individuals to work together as part of a group. In plural societies, political parties, interest organizations, voluntary associations, and religious congregations serve an important role. Putnam et al. (1994) said these associations all help to “make democracy work.” Meyer and Tarrow (1998) characterize contemporary postindustrial societies as “social movement societies” in which interest organizations and protest groups are nearly ubiquitous. Too often, however, collective action is taken for granted by civic activists and prescriptive theorists of civil society alike. It is easy to assume that, because people belong to groups with common interests, the members of that group will act in concert to achieve those interests. These assumptions are challenged by collective action theory.