The Politicisation of Migration

Wouter van der Brug, Gianni D'Amato, Didier Ruedin, Joost Berkhout, Wouter van der Brug, Gianni D'Amato, Didier Ruedin, Joost Berkhout

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138852792
• eBook ISBN: 9781317527558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften

Why are migration policies sometimes heavily contested and high on the political agenda? And why do they, at other moments and in other countries, hardly lead to much public debate? The entrance and settlement of migrants in Western Europe has prompted various political reactions. In some countries anti-immigration parties have gained substantial public support while in others migration policies have been hardly controversial.

The Politicisation of Migration examines the differences between seven Western European countries by developing a conceptual framework to empirically explain patterns of politicisation and de-politicisation. The analyses show that over the past decade immigration has been increasingly defined in socio-cultural terms and that it has been receiving less political attention since the economic crisis started in 2007. This book also looks at the role of mainstream parties and political actors in the process of politicisation, and demonstrates how the role of 'challengers' is more limited than often assumed.

Contributing to literatures on migration, party politics and agenda-setting, the book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of politics and migration studies.

1

A FRAMEWORK FOR STUDYING THE POLITICISATION OF IMMIGRATION

Wouter van der Brug, Gianni D’Amato, Joost Berkhout and Didier Ruedin

1.1 Introduction

When the Muslim fundamentalist Mohammed Bouyeri murdered the Dutch film director Theo van Gogh in November 2004, this sparked off an intense and heated debate in the Netherlands about the alleged incompatibility between the teachings of the Koran and liberal democracy, and on the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism (Hajer and Uitermark, 2008). Earlier that year, in March 2004, Muslim fundamentalists had bombed a metro train in Madrid, killing 191 and injuring 1,800 people. In response to this terrorist attack, hardly any public discussion ensued about the dangers of political Islam and its threats to Western democracy. Why is it that the same issues are sometimes heavily politicised and in other instances practically not? Which mechanisms can explain the differences in the extent to which, and the way in which, potential issues become politicised? In this volume, we seek to answer this general question by means of a comparative study of the (de)politicisation of immigration and integration in seven Western European countries: Austria, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom in the years 1995 to 2009.

To a certain degree this study builds and extends upon another monograph entitled ‘Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe’ by Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni and Florence Passy (Koopmans et al., 2005). The main aim of that monograph was very similar to ours, namely to explain cross-national differences in patterns of mobilisation in five countries: Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland in the years 1992 to 1998. Moreover, our study employs the empirical approach developed by Koopmans et al. (2005): political claims analysis. So, our study is in many ways indebted to the work of Koopmans et al. Yet, our study is not a replication of theirs with newer data and a different set of countries. It is different in three important aspects. First of all, the main aim of the study by Koopmans et al. was to explain differences between the types of actors who politicised the issue of immigration in the five countries they studied, and on the sub-issues that were emphasised. While our volume also looks at such differences, its main focus is on the explanation of degrees of politicisation, which we conceptualise in terms of two aspects: salience and polarisation. A second way in which our study is different is that it explicitly focuses on changes within countries over time, whereas this gets little attention in the study by Koopmans et al. A third way in which our study is different is in its theoretical perspective on how to explain cross-national and over time differences in politicisation. Koopmans et al. focus almost exclusively on the political opportunity structure and the discursive opportunity structure in each of the countries. We examine a broader range of potential theoretical explanations for politicisation. In our book we develop a typology of four different types of explanations, of which opportunity structures are only one, and we explore the plausibility of each of these possible explanations of politicisation.

This study contributes to different sets of literature, such as those on migration, party politics and agenda-setting, that rarely speak to each other. By providing an overview of the ways in which the issue of immigration has become politicised, or has been de-politicised in these countries, the volume is of interest to scholars in the field of migration studies. Within this broad but substantively specialised discipline, many scholars work on the differences between countries in their migration policies, regulations and customs (e.g. Hochschild and Mollenkopf, 2009; Martiniello and Rath, 2010; Bird et al., 2011; Bonjour et al., 2011; Joppke and Seidle, 2012). Yet, with some exceptions (e.g. Koopmans et al., 2005; Dolezal et al., 2012), our knowledge about the politicisation of immigration and integration is limited to case studies of one or two countries (Green-Pedersen and Krogstrup, 2008; van Heerden et al., 2014), which cannot be easily compared due to differences in types of data and approaches. In the next chapter we outline why the issue of immigration and civic integration lends itself well for a comparative study of politicisation.

On a theoretical level, the main contribution of the volume is to the large body of literature on how political issues emerge and evolve. Such questions are at the heart of political science, political sociology and communication science. Students of public opinion and public policies focus a substantial proportion of their research on responsiveness, i.e. the extent to which policies reflect public opinion (e.g. Klingemann et al., 1994; Erikson et al., 2002; Jones and Baumgartner, 2005; Soroka and Wlezien, 2010). In their attempt to explain the formal government agenda, such studies tend to either emphasise public policy dynamics (in the tradition of: Cobb and Elder, 1983; Kingdon, 1984; Baumgartner and Jones, 1993) or focus on public opinion (e.g. Erikson et al., 2002; Soroka and Wlezien, 2010). Our study of politicisation focuses on the various steps that affect the relationship between social phenomena such as public opinion, and political outcomes, including public policies. The focus of our study is on the interactions of actors intermediating between the public on the one hand and public policies on the other. This includes, but is not limited to, (1) party competition, (2) political mobilisation of non-party political actors and (3) government policy initiatives. Yet there are several differences and similarities between our study and the literature on each of these three subjects.

Much research in the field of party politics focuses on the circumstances under which different types of political parties aim to put issues on the agenda, while others aim to prevent this from happening (e.g. Carmines and Stimson, 1989; Green-Pedersen, 2007; Meguid, 2008; De Vries and Hobolt, 2012). In explaining agenda-setting strategies of political parties, such studies on the relative party political attention to political issues tend to rely on rather crude dichotomous distinctions between government and opposition parties (e.g. Green-Pedersen, 2007) or between mainstream and ‘niche’ parties (e.g. Meguid, 2008). In addition, scholars of party political positions study party positions in relative isolation from actual, day-to-day party political interaction, for instance through the assessment of party manifestos. While the observations during election years provide strategic indications of the policies that parties propose, they provide no information about tactical short-term changes in the actual political agenda, as political debates and practices will respond to events and developments. As a result, parties will often discuss quite different issues (and position themselves differently) than highlighted in their manifestos. As further described below, we strongly rely on theories of strategic interaction of political parties but we employ them to a broader range of actors and in the context of actual political processes.

In the literature on social movements we find a relatively strong emphasis on the social dynamics underlying political mobilisation. For instance, Koopmans et al. (2005) study how institutional and discursive structures, framed in particular by the dominant concept of citizenship, affect the actions of anti-immigration parties and movements and of civil society organisations that defend the interests of migrants. More established political actors that have more ready access to state institutions, or that are part of these institutional structures, are not in themselves seen as agents of politicisation whose activities merit explanation. Our approach differs from theirs, because we focus explicitly on the actions of government agents and of political parties and our analyses will demonstrate that these actors play a crucial role in determining the degree to which, and the ways in which, the issue of immigration became (de-)politicised in the various countries we investigate.

Scholars of public policy are interested in why and how certain issues are, or become, part of the agenda of government whereas others do not (e.g. Cobb and Elder, 1983; Kingdon, 1984; Baumgartner and Jones, 1993). Beyond characteristics of the policy field, this commonly requires a focus on ‘pre-decisional’ processes (Cobb and Elder, 1983: 12) such as party competition and interest group activities, similar to the political processes we are interested in. Beyond the government agenda, scholars may include in their study the whole ‘agenda of controversy, the list of questions which are recognized by the active participants in politics as legitimate subjects of attention and concern’ (Walker, 1966: 292). Regardless of the precise focus, the ultimate research interest in this field is in the extent to which issues gain entry to the government agenda. However, our study does not only focus on (conflicts over) the government agenda, but also on cases in which the issues of migration and integration are politicised by collective actors even if no government decisions are made at all. Further, agenda-setting studies do not take the political position of political actors into consideration and, as highlighted by among others Walgrave and Varone (2008), are relatively inattentive to the role of political parties.

Our volume contributes to these studies in a number of ways. First of all, we develop a conceptual framework of the core concept ‘politicisation’, which in our view consists of two dimensions: polarisation and increased salience. Admittedly, we are not the first to have pointed out that both elements are important. Yet studies that have focused on position-taking as well as salience generally aim to explain how parties’ strategies affect their electoral success (e.g. Meguid, 2008; De Vries and Hobolt, 2012), or to explain the impact of successful politicisation of issues on the party system (e.g. Carmines and Stimson, 1989). So, the politicisation of issues is an independent variable in those studies, while in our case, it is what we aim to explain.

Second, we developed a typology of four different types of explanations on the basis of two distinctions: (1) whether the process of politicisation is seen as a top-down, or bottom-up process, and (2) whether we explain processes of politicisation by structural developments or by the actions and ambitions of various actors (structure vs. agency). We explore the plausibility of each of the four explanations for (the lack of) politicisation. Even though the topic of politicisation is at the heart of political science, the current state of the research remains inconclusive regarding the relative importance of various explanations. We aim to address this lacuna by (1) including a broader range of explanations and (2) employing a more comprehensive empirical and conceptual definition of politicisation.

Third, a substantial proportion of research on politicisation is ‘fragmented’ in separate research traditions specialised in the role of parties (e.g. Carmines and Stimson, 1989), social movements (e.g. Ferree et al., 2002), the media (e.g. Dearing and Rogers, 1996; McCombs, 2004) or policy-makers (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993). This study is not a priori restricted to the role of a specific type of actor, but we instead provide an overview of the actors driving processes of politicisation in the different countries.

Finally, we detect and explain cross-country differences in the patterns of politicisation. A comparative research design provides us with variation on a range of factors that potentially explain the nature and extent of politicisation. Such variation comes in addition to changes over time between 1995 and 2009 in each country. This is the main focus of the country chapters.

The structure of this introductory chapter is as follows. We will first outline a conceptual map of politicisation, which we conceptualise as a two-dimensional process. After outlining two dimensions of politicisation, we will develop a typology of four different types of explanations for how an issue might (or might not) become politicised. In the final section, we will briefly outline the structure of the book.

1.2 What is politicisation?

Two bodies of literature exist which focus on ways in which issues become politicised, or not. The first tradition of research is concerned with agenda-setting. Under which circumstances does a social problem become defined as a problem that requires action from public officials? It is not until a social problem is defined as a problem that we can really speak of a political issue. Agenda-setting theory focuses on the different thresholds that prevent a topic from becoming a political issue and prevent an issue from reaching the stage where policies are formulated.

Agenda-setting studies in political science point to the relative attention, the salience, of issues in various arenas of politics (e.g. Downs, 1972; Cobb and Elder, 1983; Kingdon, 1984; Jones and Baumgartner, 2005; Baumgartner et al., 2009a). In an overly simplified view of such agenda-setting approaches, issue attention travels from public opinion via the news media through party politics to the government and its policies. Such studies focus on the variation in government responsiveness to political issues. The rank-order of issues, the restricted nature of agendas and the (un)likely pathways of issue-salience are important parameters explaining differences in politicisation. These agenda-setting explanations, however, (1) miss the magnitude and character of the conflict in terms of the positions taken by the participants, and (2) conceptually prioritise the government agenda relative to other agendas. For instance, in 1953 the Netherlands experienced a major flood in the southern province of Zeeland, killing 2,551 people. Obviously, this raised enormous concern about the quality and safety of the dykes and there was large agreement on the necessity of measures to protect the country from such hazards. In terms of the government agenda, the issue of water management has clearly become salient. However, there was no disagreement on the issue. The political action was largely restricted to broadly supported public policy initiatives, which became controversial only 20 years after the event (Leemans and Geers, 1983). In contrast to public policy oriented agenda-setting studies, we include the activities, as measured through claims-making, of all kinds of collective actors, without prioritising state actors or the government agenda. We thus conceptually differentiate the government agenda from the broader political agenda.

A second body of literature focuses more on party competition in terms of conflict and positional disagreement. Scholars of political parties and party competition highlight the importance of positional competition and the extent to which political parties (and the electorate) have different, polarised positions on the issue (e.g. Downs, 1957; Carmines and Stimson, 1989; Stimson, 2004). Electoral competition is seen as a process in which parties present different choices to the electorate in terms of different positions on issues and opposing ideological positions. Schattschneider (1960: 2) highlights conflict as the key distinctive aspect of politics: ‘At the root of all politics is the universal language of conflict’. When political actors have different positions they are in conflict – the issue is polarised.

We argue that both polarisation and salience are essential for understanding processes of politicisation. Opposing positions may exist, but when the issue is not on the political agenda, the conflict is latent. It only changes from a latent to a manifest conflict when the issue becomes more salient. This increase in salience might change the political landscape fundamentally when the actors are aligned differently on this new line of conflict than on pre-existing ones. Conflicts do not only divide those parties on the opposite sides of the conflict line, but they also unite actors who are on the same side. If collective actors want to win a conflict, they will invest time and energy into building a coalition with like-minded allies. Once such a coalition is formed and trust is built, such a coalition is a valuable asset. Especially when parties have created a government coalition, this collaboration adds to their influence on policy-making and to the career opportunities of the party leadership. Consequently, these parties have an incentive to keep the coalition intact, and therefore they will try to avoid putting issues on the agenda about which they disagree to such an extent that no acceptable compromise can be reached. Instead of fighting simultaneously at different fronts, they must decide ‘which battle do we want most to win?’ (Schattschneider, 1960: 67). A similar conceptual rationale provides incentives to parties to de-emphasise issues on which they internally disagree. Both voters and parties seek consistency among positions on various issues; this provides additional incentives to de-emphasise certain issues in favour of others (e.g. Stimson, 2004: 58–76). Whether new issues become politicised and the ways in which they evolve thus depends to a large degree upon pre-existing coalitions. This also explains why party systems are often structured by one single overarching dimension. Even when more than one ideological dimension structures the conflicting principles that guide parties’ behaviour, not all these dimensions become equally organised. Normally, parties will organise coalitions with actors that are close to them on the conflict dimension that they consider most important. This becomes the dominant dimension of conflict, because most parties avoid ‘fighting’ conflicts that do not correspond with this dimension, or that cannot be made compatible with it. So, mainstream parties have an incentive to keep such incompatible issues off the political agenda.

Yet, neither the governing parties nor even mainstream parties as a group can exercise full control over the political agenda. New issues are often politicised by (new) parties that choose not to compete on issues th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 A framework for studying the politicisation of immigration
• 2 Research design
• 3 The politicisation of immigration in Austria
• 4 The politicisation of immigration in Belgium
• 5 The politicisation of immigration in Ireland
• 6 The politicisation of immigration in the Netherlands
• 7 The politicisation of immigration in Spain
• 8 The politicisation of immigration in Switzerland: The importance of direct democracy
• 9 The politicisation of immigration in Britain
• 10 Cross-country comparisons and conclusions
• Technical Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index