Theorizing the link between political participation and political integration

This article scrutinizes the shared intuition in migration studies that more political participation by immigrants inherently indicates more political integration - what is it about immigrant participation that we would consider it an issue of integration? In particular, it focuses on the standard view that immigrants’ participation could be used as a proxy for political integration. How are political participation and political integration linked theoretically, and is this link appropriate for using participation as a proxy for integration? To answer this question, I first ask why we would care about immigrant participation as a research subject in the first place. I provide a new, six-fold typology of the virtuous qualities that could be ascribed to political participation in general, and to the political participation of immigrants specifically: education, identification, epistemic democratization, emancipation, legitimation, and interest satisfaction. Based on this typology, I analyze (i) why political participation could be important; (ii) why the political participation of immigrants could be important; (iii) what attributing this quality to the participation of migrants implies about a conception of integration, when using it as proxy for its measurement, and (iv) what we would know about this interpretation of integration if we were to use the political participation of migrants as a proxy for its measurement. I argue that none of the potential virtues of participation provides an appropriate ground for measuring political integration through immigrant participation. Using immigrant participation as a proxy for integration generates undesirable conceptions of political integration; provides too little information about its actual attainment, or both.