This article investigates how Danish and Swedish national policies vis-à-vis refugees and asylum seekers are perceived, and responded to, at the municipal level in the cities of Aarhus and Malmö. As will be spelled out in the article, municipal representatives raised their voices in both Denmark and Sweden during the middle of the 1990s, arguing that their municipalities had to carry a larger 'burden of reception' than they could manage, and they thus urged for changes in the national dispersal and migration policies. The response at the national level was dramatically different in Denmark than in Sweden, however. This is today apparent not only in the sheer numbers of newcomers but also in municipal introduction practices as well as in the institutional memories of municipal officials. Points for practitionersThe findings presented in this study point both to the possibility for municipalities to have a direct impact on national policies, in this case mainly on refugee settlement policies, but also to how policy decisions at one point in time shapes the political opportunity structures at national as well as local levels at later points in time.

Theories of participation have been developed and tested almost exclusively on majority populations. While the relative under-representation of ethnic minorities in the political process is regularly asserted, their participatory behaviour is therefore generally less-well understood. Using recently gathered data based on a sample of residents in the region of Greater Stockholm, Sweden, this article considers two primary questions: whether associational affiliation increases individuals' likelihood of political participation and whether these effects are the same for immigrants and native Swedes. It is shown that associational affiliation lowers the thresholds of political participation for immigrants by offering a training ground for civic skills and, albeit of lesser importance, an arena for political recruitment. In contrast, the positive correlation between affiliation and political participation among native Swedes instead seems to stem from processes of self-selection. While associational affiliation thus seems to be an important means for the political integration of immigrants, the political importance of associational affiliation for the majority population may well be called in question.

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This paper provides evidence of segregation-generated differences in political recruitment. Focusing on social-geographical differentiation in the urban landscape, it evaluates—in prior work largely neglected—contextual effects on requests for political participation. Consistent with previous research, the analyses suggest that political activists, who try to convince others to participate, systematically use a set of selection criteria when deciding whom to approach. However, using data based on a sample of inhabitants of Swedish cities and properties of their neighbourhoods, evidence is also presented for aggregate-level social exclusion influences on individual-level recruitment efforts. Consistent with the theoretical framework presented, the results indicate that the contextual effect stems both from the disproportional population composition in residential areas and from recruiters’ rational avoidance of areas marked by high levels of social exclusion. The net result, it is concluded, is a reinforcement of urban inequalities when it comes to the chances to be invited to political life.

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