Adriana Cassis Defends Dissertation on Second-Generation Political Participation

At the end of May this year, Adriana Cassis defended her dissertation at the University of Duisburg-Essen. “Having It All – or Nothing at All? The Transnational Political Participation of Children of Turkish Immigrants in Germany and the Netherlands” begins from a paradox: Given that children born to immigrants in their country of residence have full access to education and political rights, they could be expected to be more politically engaged than their parents. And yet participation gaps persist into the second generation. Cassis therefore asks why political engagement is determined not by integration in the country of residence alone but also by transnational attachments. Her study focuses on people of Turkish origin in Germany and the Netherlands, who make up the largest immigrant-origin group in Western Europe. Using a mixed-methods design, she brings together quantitative analyses of electoral and non-electoral participation and interviews with highly educated second-generation individuals. She shows that there is no uniform pattern to political engagement and that it follows practice-specific and intersectional logics: Education, experience of discrimination, identification, gender, and religious and civil society networks have different effects depending on social position. National context is important, too: Political action tends to take the form of non-electoral practices in Germany and electoral practices in the Netherlands. The study connects intersectionality with transnationalism in its theoretical framework and contributes to debates on the integration paradox. Achim Goerres supervised the dissertation. Adriana Cassis was a doctoral researcher at the MPIfG’s graduate school, the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE), from 2022 and will remain at the University of Duisburg-Essen as a postdoc until the end of September 2026.