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This special issue addresses the need for cross-national analyses on immigrant integration. The articles in this issue examine the integration processes of Latino immigrants in the United States and in Spain in several aspects—socioeconomic, legal, educational, and political—and through varied methods—quantitative as well as qualitative—contributing to the literature in several ways. By focusing on the same ethnic group across different contexts, it provides a thorough comparison of the mechanisms at play in their integration processes. It emphasizes the context-specific and culture-specific elements that most affect immigrants’ integration. This special issue gathers nine articles that offer complementary perspectives on the integration of Latino immigrants in Spain and the United States.

Latin Americans represent one of the most sizable migrant communities in Spain. Yet, unlike other minority groups, they count with longer migration tradition, linguistic and cultural similarities with the Spanish population, and easier access to Spanish nationality. Drawing on original data covering a large number of candidates ( N = 5,055), this article examines whether this apparently favorable configuration guarantees the nomination of candidates from this minority group at local elections in municipalities with strong demographic presence of Latin American residents. Our findings indicate that this group is still underrepresented in Spanish politics. Few Latin American candidates are fielded by political parties, and even fewer (<2%) manage to achieve elected office. To interpret these results, we examine the extent to which Spanish parties field minority candidates. We show that while some parties are proactively including these candidates, only few nominate them in secure positions of the electoral lists and that Spanish parties’ inclusiveness does not seem to be aligned with Latin American voters’ partisan preferences.

ResumenLos determinantes de los niveles de integración vertical en los partidos políticos y su influencia sobre las estrategias de las facciones internas de los partidos han sido poco estudiados en la literatura, y los pocos trabajos que lo han hecho se han centrado en partidos de ámbito estatal. Aquí argumentamos que la organización de los partidos afecta de forma definitiva al comportamiento de las facciones internas, de tal forma que el faccionalismo tendrá un carácter más territorializado en partidos con bajos niveles de integración. Para ilustrar esta hipótesis, empleamos la evidencia empírica de un partido de ámbito no estatal (PANE): el Partido Nacionalista Vasco. Palabras clave: partido de ámbito no estatal, faccionalismo, integración vertical, descentralización. Abstract. Factionalism and vertical integration in multilevel contexts. The case of the Basque Nationalist PartyThe determinants of the distinct levels of party vertical integration and their influence on internal factions' strategies have been certainly understudied so far, and those few works attempting to do it have focused on statewide political parties. Here we claim that party organization eventually affects the behavior of internal factions, so that factionalism will have a more territorial character in parties with low levels of vertical integration than in the rest. This argument is then illustrated with empirical evidence from one non-statewide party: the Basque Nationalist Party,

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