Rethinking Immigrant Political Incorporation: What Have We Learned, and What Next?

In the introduction to this volume, the editors make several interrelated critiques of prior research on immigrant political incorporation (IPI): that few studies have de! ned the concept explicitly; that de! nitions (such as they appear) are inconsistent; that few studies have made comparisons across nation-states or cities or other well-de! ned contexts for political action (comparing groups in a given context is somewhat more common); that premises or rationales for particular theoretical or empirical approaches are o" en unstated; that discrete outcomes—organizational formation, mobilization behavior, rates or outcomes of electoral participation, and so on—are o" en examined in isolation from any larger process or pathway of incorporation; and that causal mechanisms are frequently unspeci! ed. $ ey also charge that few researchers endeavor to build on the speci! ed models that do exist and thereby build a ! eld. In sum, the editors conclude that there has been relatively li% le development of theory that can be shown to have broad applicability, that is, to provide a strong basis for making comparisons across contexts (time, place, groups) or for generating predictions. Perhaps this is because many researchers have had other priorities—that their work, while informative and relevant, was not designed to illuminate IPI as a whole, let alone cumulate into a broadly applicable theory of IPI. $ e key question for readers of this volume, and the one on which I will focus in this essay, is: how can the contributions in this volume help us compare and predict more e& ectively? $ eory building is a gradual—some would say glacial—process, proceeding through distinct stages. What expectations are reasonable at this stage, since all agree that IPI is a multifaceted social phenomenon with features that are very OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue Mar 12 2013, NEWGEN