Immigrant and Ethnic Organisations as a Source of Resources

Active members of voluntary associations are in various ways believed to acquire skills that may be useful also in political life. Even non-political organisations may stimulate their members to become interested in local community affairs, and they may also provide a platform for networks through which members are solicited to take part in political activities. This is even more so for voluntary organizations in which immigrants engage as they may provide certain services progressively abandoned by public administrations due to welfare state retrenchment. Utilising individual level data, scholars have produced decent evidence for these theoretically reasonable casual mechanisms. However, fine-grained information concerning the organisational level as such is scarce. The main aim of this paper is to map the structural characteristics of immigrants’ organizational human, financial and social capital in different European cities. Using the unique organizational survey conducted within the framework of the Localmultidem research program, we will be able to examine variation – across cities, ethnic groups and types of organisations – in terms of resources (budget, size, staff, sources of budget etc.) but also in terms of networks with other associations and with other key social actors. Conducting these analyses on the organisational level means taking voluntary associations seriously as political actors – and as a political ‘weapon of the weak’, reducing political inequality in socio-economically stratified societies, that they are sometimes claimed to be. Though the individual side effects may in principle be the result of participation in all types of organisations, the supply of utilities like administrative knowledge, awareness of social issues and interest in public matters is probably richer in some types of organisations than in others.