Romain Garbaye

Ethnic minority participation in British and French cities: a historical–institutionalist perspective

In this article, I set out to explain cross-national variations between styles of ethnic minority incorporation in the conventional political systems of British and French cities. To this aim, I draw inspiration from, and refine, institutionalist approaches to minority participation. I focus on a comparison of two cases, Birmingham (England) and Lille (France). I construct a parsimonious explanatory framework focused on three institutional factors: central-local relations in each country and local party politics and styles of local government in each city. I argue that these elements combine in different ways in each country to produce different local political environments for the politics of ethnic minorities, thereby shaping patterns of participation and conditioning their success, or absence thereof, in the electoral process of cities. Because of local specificities, my two cases are not entirely representative of other cities, but they provide an illustration of the political processes at work in most cities. In Birmingham, minorities participate successfully in Labour party politics, while in Lille, they are submitted to persistent political exclusion at the hands of a powerful Socialist party machine. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

British Cities and Ethnic Minorities in the Post-war Era: From Xenophobic Agitation to Multi-Ethnic Government

This essay retraces the history of immigration and ethnic minority politics in British cities in the post-war era. It shows that British cities evolved in that period from an attitude of indifference and/or hostility to immigrants in the late 1950s, to the creation of race-sensitive policies in the context of a bipartisan effort to depoliticize the issue at the national level in the 1960s, and finally to increasing participation of minorities in the politics of the Labour Party from the late 1970s onward.