Do parties “act” as they “talk” about immigrants’ incorporation?

Comparative studies have researched the position of political parties on immigration, but very limited research has been done on how parties promote inclusion of immigrants in their own organization (exception few studies explored this on specific national contexts such as Sobolewska 2013; Burchianti & Zapata-Barrero 2016; Markard & Dähnke 2017; Szlovak 2017). Parties’ positive position toward immigration is the first stipulation toward further actions on immigrants’ incorporation in parties. However, parties’ positions do not always translate into organizational actions. This paper will provide cross-national evidence on party positions and party actions on immigrants’ incorporation. Using Brunsson’s (1989) neo-institutional theory on organizations, this paper, will test the coherence of parties positions and parties actions on immigrants incorporation and assess the organizational behaviour parties have over the issue of migration. Beyond general political party organizational characteristics, particular focus will be given to mechanisms that promote immigrants incorporation in parties such as comities and working groups on diversity, minority quotas, candidates nomination procedure, selection process of party officials (centralization and inclusion of diversity), recruitment. That being said, this paper will describe the mechanisms parties use to include immigrants in their organizations and test how those mechanisms influence the immigrants’ representation in legislative. The analysis of party positions will be based on manifesto data from Parties’ Immigration and Integration Positions Dataset (PImPo), while the political parties organizational characteristics will be analysed using the Political Party Database Project. Knowledge how parties incorporate immigrants in their organization will contribute to both literature on immigrants’ representation and literature on political party politics.