The Role of Ethnic Origin as an Attribute of Migrant Voluntary Associations in the Formation and Detection of Components of Migrant Organisational Networks in European Cities

Previous scholarship on migrant voluntary associations (MVO) has emphasised the role of the structural properties and patterns of migrant organisational networks in explaining the degree of political action and social engagement of MVO in different settings and contexts. Most of the previous studies focus on binary networks with only one type of relation among MVO and/or on networks of MVO of one ethnic origin. This paper investigates how the ethnic origin of MVO affects the formation and detection of components as communities and sub-graphs in weighted networks of meetings/consultations/exchange of information, collaboration in projects or events, and sharing of resources by following a “top-down” approach. This paper will present the relational and network data of surveys of MVO in multiple European cities. The surveys were designed by an international team of European researchers within the FP6 project Localmultidem (http://www.um.es/localmultidem/) and the Multicultural Democracy in Europe network between 2003 and 2009. The study and the questionnaire have been replicated recently by the author in Athens (Greece), adding to the range of contexts where the same research design and network survey have been applied. Therefore, the main methodological objective of this paper is first, to follow a comparative approach and, secondly, to mobilise social network analysis methods and visualisations to focus simultaneously on three different types of relations among MVO of multiple ethnic origins in 4 European cities (Barcelona, Budapest, Zurich and Athens). As a result, it intends to contribute conceptually and methodologically to the relevance of social network theory and graph theory in the field of migrants’ organisational networking, and empirically to the application of the methods of social network analysis and graph theory to the comparative study of, not previously similarly studied, survey relational data among different kinds of political and non-political MVO. The paper will be structured as follows. The introduction presents the key aims of the paper, the scholarly field within which community detection in weighted migrant organisational networks is most relevant and the value of a comparative perspective. The next section describes the attributes of the nodes and the relations of the networks and explains how weights of ties are produced are produced additively by three different types of relations. The following section analyses the components of the networks by focusing a) on the role of the strength of ties into the formation of components and b) on identifying the roled of cut-points as weak points among components. The fourth section presents the comparison of the components in terms of their internal ethnic heterogeneity. The fifth section presents and discusses the comparison across cities. The final section draws the conclusions and suggests future directions for the detection of components.