The transnational political opportunity structure and the relational turn in the analysis of political involvement and the migrant associative movement

In migrant political participation studies it is common to find approaches based on the political opportunity structure (POS); a perspective that emerged from studies on social movements and civic activism. POS confronts other approaches that conceive collective action based on the natural aggregation of common interests. Instead of this, POS highlights the relevance of political context to explain the development of several political practices of migrants. POS is currently one of the dominant approaches in analyzing migrant activism. The aim of this article is to reflect on these debates and highlight the most important constraints of this perspective. To do so, we focus on immigrants’ self-organizations in Spain and the links between them and their countries. The article presents a proposal of a relational and dynamic research framework in order to take into account the main factors that should be considered when dealing with migrants’ civic and political participation.