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 substantially lower than for native born citizens and questions have arisen regarding the degree to which this may be symptomatic of a larger integration issue. The aim of this paper is to explore the determinants of voting within the context of social inclusion by comparing immigrants, their descendants and native citizens in Sweden while controlling for a range of socio-economic, demographic characteristics and contextual factors. We use two unique sets of data to conduct our research. The 2006 Electoral Participation Survey contains information on individual electoral participation in national, county and municipal elections. We match this information to registry data from Statistics Sweden which contains socio-demographic information for every Swedish resident. From these two sources, we are able to create a database which matches voting behaviour to individual characteristics for more than 70,000 residents of whom almost 13,000 are not citizens. We find that after controlling for demographic, socio-economic and contextual characteristics, acquisition of citizenship makes a real difference to the odds of voting and is therefore, a likely and powerful indicator of social inclusion. Immigrants who obtain citizenship are far more likely to vote than those who do not. Arguably, some of this may be attributed to the number of years of residency in the country. However, even non-citizens born in Sweden have substantially lower odds of voting. Country of birth also makes a difference. Immigrants from the Americas and those born in Sweden with immigrant parents are more likely to vote than immigrants from other countries. Somewhat surprisingly, age at immigration does not make a substantial difference to the odds of voting.

With the exception of economists, social scientists have a long and detailed history of analyzing the political and social implications of citizenship acquisition by immigrants. Economists, on the other hand, have occasionally entered the field in an ad hoc manner with limited speculations about the possible earnings or employment effects that may derive from immigrant citizenship ascension. This book goes one step further by providing an economic model to predict immigrant citizenship and its impact in the labour market and the public finance spheres in a comparative framework. Five countries – Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway – with five different immigrant selection and citizenship-granting procedures are analyzed to test the robustness of the economic model. The results indicate that the immigrant selection process in turn influences a given country’s citizenship-granting process and affects the size of the economic premium derived from citizenship. Thus, the authors conclude that the design of a country’s immigration and citizenship policies influences the degree of economic integration of its potential citizens.

This article studies the importance of local conditions for the employment integration of refugees in Sweden, this in contrast to most studies on immigrant economic integration primarily conducted on the national level or for the larger cities. The data used in the analysis is on male and female natives and twelve refugee groups for the year 2003. Besides monitoring the regional variation in employment integration of twelve refugee groups, this paper, with the use of logistic regressions, estimates the effect of individual and human capital characteristics, internal migration, municipality, local labour market and economic sector factors on the refugees’ odds of being employed. The local variations of refugees’ integration into the labour market were partly a result of internal migration, in most cases from less to more populated municipalities. The job opportunities were better in Stockholm than in other big cities like Malmö and Göteborg. The local unemployment and employment rates, a proxy for the local supply of jobs, significantly affected the individual refugees’ chances to obtain employment. This also applies to the size of the labour market through increased diversification in the supply of job openings. We also find that the structure of the local economy affected the refugees’ probability of obtaining employment. Areas with lower general education and skill levels were positively related, whereas, for example, university localities were negatively related to refugees’ employment chances. Refugees had higher probabilities of being employed in industry in less population-dense areas and in the private service sector in larger cities.

This paper offers an overview of immigration to Sweden in the last decades of the twentieth century, including the labour market integration and residential segregation of immigrants. The character of immigration has gradually changed from primarily labour migration up to the middle of the 1970s to refugee immigration and family reunification during the last decades of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s economic integration of immigrants has gradually decreased while residential segregation has increased. This development reached its peak in the early 1990s, when refugee immigration increased considerably at the same time as the economy deteriorated. Integration policies have not blocked this negative process.

Härmed överlämnar IMER/Malmö högskola den fjärde rapporten i utvärderingen av Nationellt exempel/storstadssatsningen i Rosengård avseende perioden september 2000 till och med september 2001. Utvärderingen inriktar sig på insatserna inom de fyra programområden som urskiljs i det reviderade programförslaget för storstadssatsningen (september 2000): Arbetsmarknadsåtgärder, Förskola, Skola och Lokalt utvecklingsarbete. Enligt uppdraget ska utvärderingen omfatta såväl effekter som processer inom de olika programområdena.