Dissertation Project (Book-Style)
My dissertation examines how interactions between immigrants and natives shape the attitudinal dimensions of political integration in contexts marked by anti-immigrant sentiment, with a particular focus on Belgium and Germany.
This dissertation examines why some immigrants become politically integrated into host societies while others do not. Moving beyond approaches that focus primarily on immigrants’ individual characteristics, the project develops a relational perspective that centers immigrants’ everyday interactions with native-born populations.
The core argument is that political integration is not simply a function of contact with natives, but depends on how immigrants experience and interpret those interactions within broader societal contexts. I theorize that appreciation-based interpersonal contact, meaning interactions in which immigrants feel recognized, respected, and valued, can foster political belonging, trust, and efficacy by reshaping how immigrants see themselves in relation to the host society. These effects operate through mechanisms of decategorization and recategorization, which transform social boundaries and enable immigrants to identify with a shared civic community. At the same time, the dissertation argues that these processes are conditional on context. In settings characterized by anti-immigrant sentiment, exclusionary discourse, or perceived hostility, even frequent contact may fail to translate into political integration. By distinguishing between interpersonal interaction and contextual hostility, the project shows how micro-level experiences and macro-level environments jointly shape immigrants’ political incorporation.
Bringing together comparative political behavior and political psychology, the dissertation offers a minority-centered extension of contact theory that explains when and how intergroup relations promote political integration. The dissertation employs a mixed-methods design, combining survey data, qualitative interviews, and an original experiment.
This chapter studies how the quality of interpersonal interaction influences immigrant political integration. Rather than focusing only on the presence of contact, it considers whether positive, meaningful, and trust-building interactions shape belonging and political incorporation differently.
The qualitative component of the dissertation explores how first-generation immigrants describe their social relationships, political experiences, and sense of place in the host society. These interviews provide context for the survey and experimental findings and help identify the mechanisms through which intergroup relations matter.
This dissertation paper examines whether contact with natives contributes to immigrants’ political integration. It asks whether immigrants can be socially included in everyday life while still remaining politically distant from the host society.