Who is your ally? Political parties as elite allies of immigrant associations locally

Cities and towns are the proximity context where immigrants interact with political actors who can channel their demands. Treating immigration as a salient policy field in this setting reveals how political parties and immigrant associations relate to each other. In this paper, I study when politica...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Triviño Salazar, Juan Carlos
Format: article
Status:Versión aceptada para publicación
Publication Date:2020
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repository:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/46747
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/46747
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1526060
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Elite allies
Political parties
Immigrant associations
Politicisation
Local level
Spain
Description
Summary:Cities and towns are the proximity context where immigrants interact with political actors who can channel their demands. Treating immigration as a salient policy field in this setting reveals how political parties and immigrant associations relate to each other. In this paper, I study when political parties become (or do not become) elite allies of immigrant associations following the approval of policies of exclusion at the local level. To answer my question, I qualitatively study the interaction between these actors with regards to the approval of two policies in two cities in Catalonia, Spain: the burka regulation in Lleida and the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the local census in Vic. The findings make evident that local factors related to the political conflict over immigration and the associational web provide immigrant associations with varying degrees of agency that condition their relationships with political parties as elite allies.