Theorizing Political Participation in European cities: Lessons From Italy and Spain

The present paper contributes to the theoretical discussion on the factors that explain forms of political participation of immigrant and ethnic minorities in European cities. The dominant model in the field, the political opportunity structure, mainly adopts a top-down approach and focuses on the role of local policies and official discursive opportunities in encouraging participation (Morales & Giugni 2011). We argue that the exclusive focus on these factors prevent us from on the one hand, acknowledging the role of multiple actors involved in the promotion of participation and on the other, from understanding how participation takes place through the interaction among actors in a conflict-laden field. Therefore, we propose to adopt a theoretical model that combines the existing top-down approach with a bottom-up approach. This model takes into account the role of multiple political actors in cities while explaining important local variations in participation and the understanding of citizenship. Through empirical examples drawn from cities in Spain and Italy and with the support of scholarship from North America and Europe, we explain how our model sheds light on some of the questions present in the European literature. The exiting top-down approach has been developed mainly through studies from Northern European countries, where we assume a central role of the state and local authorities. We suggest that our theoretical model should be integrated in the existing literature. The model should be of use in qualitative and quantitative comparative studies seeking to study participation in cities from Northern and Southern Europe and beyond.