We analyze how having an incumbent among candidates affects electoral turnout. We use a rich data set providing information on the electoral results of Italian municipal elections over the period 1993-2011. Endogeneity issues are handled through an instrumental variable approach using the mayor...

It is widely held that voter turnout among immigrants and ethnic minorities is lower than among the native born. The goal of our paper is to explore the determinants of voting, comparing immigrant, minority and majority citizens in Canada. We use the 2002 wave of the Equality Security Community...

This paper examines whether schooling has a positive impact on individual's political interest, voting turnout, democratic values, political involvement and political group membership, using the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). Between 1949 and 1969 the number of compulsory years of...

Three decades ago, Sweden extended municipal and county voting privileges to non-citizen residents arguing that it would increase political influence, interest and self-esteem among foreign citizens. Three decades later, electoral participation on the part of immigrants is perceived as being...

This is a draft chapter for the Handbook on Economics of International Migration (Eds. B. R. Chiswick and P. W. Miller) and deals with the political incorporation of immigrants in host societies. Political incorporation is discussed with regard to the regulation of legal status, rights,...

During last sixty years, Turkish population moved from one province to another at the rate of about 7-8 percent per five-year interval. As a consequence of this massive internal migration, population residing in a province other than the one they were born in increased from 12 percent in 1950 to...

It is widely debated whether immigrants who live among co-ethnics are less willing to integrate into the host society. Exploiting the quasi-experimental guest worker placement across German regions during the 1960/70s as well as information on immigrants' inter-ethnic contact networks and social...

This paper analyses the role of social capital on immigrants' labour market outcomes. We use the "principal component analysis" (PCA) to build an index of social networks and explore its impact on the probability of getting a job and on wage levels using the Households Income and Labour Dynamics...

Theories about neighbours' influence on children based on social capital, cohesion and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. However, amongst the vast number of studies on the effect of neighbours on a child's education, none has tested whether neighbourhood stability...

In this paper we explore the relationship between ethnic fractionalization and social capital. First, we test for time differences in the impact of ethnic fractionalization on social capital using U.S. data from 1990, 1997 and 2005. Subsequently we examine the data for evidence of the conflict,...