The Politics of Migration in Italy

Perspectives on local debates and party competition

Pietro Castelli Gattinara

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317241737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Migration represents one of the key issues in both Italian and European politics, and it has triggered EU-wide debates and negotiations, alongside alarmist and often sensationalist news reporting on the activities of government, party and social movement actors.

The Politics of Migration in Italy explores what happens when previously undiscussed issues become central to political agendas and are publicly debated in the mass media. Examining how political actors engage with the issue of migration in electoral campaigning, this book highlights how complex policy issues are addressed selectively by political entrepreneurs and how the responses of political actors are influenced by strategic incentives and ongoing events. This book studies the dynamics of the politicization of the immigration issue across three local contexts in Italy – Prato, Milan and Rome – which differ systematically with respect to crucial economic, cultural and security dimensions of immigration.

Offering an innovative exploration of party competition and migration in Italy, as well as providing the conceptual and analytical tools to understand how these dynamics play out beyond the Italian case, this book is essential reading for students, scholars and policymakers working in the areas of migration studies, agenda-setting and European politics more generally.

1 Framework and context

DOI: 10.4324/9781315628677-2

2 Electoral debates on migration

A dimensional perspective

DOI: 10.4324/9781315628677-3

Introduction

This book analyzes electoral campaigning on the immigration issue in six local elections in Italy. The study of electoral campaigns by political scientists has focused on two aspects: the effects on voters and the strategies of political actors. The first stream of literature focuses on campaigns as a source for information processing by the citizens, suggesting that these provide voters with necessary information for making a choice in line with their pre-existing preferences (Arceneaux, 2005; Finkel, 1993; Gelman and King, 1993; Lazarsfeld et al., 1944; Stimson, 2004). In this sense, communication between political actors and voters is a multi-step process, which includes the media as the main transmission belt conveying political information and frames to the public (Hänggli, 2010). The second stream of research focuses more specifically on campaigning, looking at the way in which the political actors involved in electoral competition engage in public debates involving their competitors, the media and the public (Brandenburg, 2002; Hänggli, 2012; Kiousis et al., 2006; Kriesi et al., 2009; Matthes, 2012). In the course of electoral campaigns the conflict between political actors unfolds, as the actors involved form coalitions, compete and craft messages based on alternative arguments, frames and worldviews, with the goal of getting public and media attention and of mobilizing support.

I focus on the second aspect, and address the role of political actors, i.e. the actors who initiate campaign events and provide the main input into electoral debates. The key argument is that choices of politicization are driven by the attempt of political actors to control competitors and the media as to impose their preferred issues and messages in the campaign. Literature in this area is well established, as previous research has underlined that thematic emphasis is fundamental to understand electoral competition and to explain strategies and results (Budge and Farlie, 1983; Green-Pedersen and Blomqvist, 2004; Klingemann et al., 1994; Petrocik et al., 2003). At the core of ‘saliency theory’ approaches is the idea that parties do not engage in comprehensive debates addressing all policy issues, but rather privilege only those issues that they consider favourable to their side (Budge and Fairle, 1983).

This approach was applied predominantly to study the way in which parties introduce new issues on the agenda in order to manipulate the terms of the competition. The problem with this understanding is that we do not know much of what happens once the ‘new’ issues stabilize within party systems (Green-Pedersen, 2010; Rovny and Edwards, 2012; van der Brug and van Spanje, 2009). Moreover, by failing to differentiate between large policy themes, or bundles of issues, and their constitutive dimensions, this approach underestimates the complexity of policy issues in public debates. When complex bundles are publicly debated, instead, political actors generally focus on a limited, partial and often incomplete subset of their underlying dimensions (Baumgartner and Jones, 2002). In line with a growing amount of literature aiming at dissecting the elements that make up complex policy issues (De Sio, 2010; De Sio and Franklin, 2012; Froio, 2012, 2013; Guinaudeau and Persico, 2014; Helbling, 2013; Rovny, 2012), in this study I suggest looking at the different dimensions of the immigration issue upon which electoral competition takes place. I suggest that practices and efforts aimed at manipulating the electoral agenda may vary depending on the features of the issue at stake, since political decisions tend to encompass a multiplicity of dimensions of choice.

In this sense, political actors may strategically shift the point of reference of public debates from one aspect of a given political issue to another. When facing complex bundles of policy issues, political actors do not consider all features as equally important. On the contrary, they emphasize the dimensions on which they expect to enjoy a strategic advantage, which leaves them to adopt different approaches to each sub-category as well (Odmalm, 2012). Similarly, De Sio (2010) hypothesizes a ‘second-stage’ of selective emphasis: when confronted with complex issues, parties do not only choose whether to address the issue or not, but they can also decide which aspects of a given issue they want to highlight and which others they prefer to hide.

In order to test this idea, my choice is to focus on immigration, a policy issue that has often been recognized as being complex, multidimensional or at least cutting across traditional policy areas (i.e. Helbling et al., 2010; Höglinger et al., 2012, Odmalm, 2011; Odmalm and Super, 2014), yet it has predominantly been analyzed as a single issue in party competition. I shall compare three case studies that differ in terms of composition of the immigrant populations and of the corresponding key immigration problems. By looking at electoral campaigns in each city setting and by comparing campaigns across contexts, my aim is to assess the constraints and opportunities that determine discursive choices of actors in electoral campaigns on migration. The remainder of this chapter will first introduce the choice of focusing on the issue of immigration and present the rationale for the identification of its constitutive dimensions and frames. Then I shall outline the main argument of the book, and discuss a model for the understanding of electoral campaign strategies based on multiple issue dimensions and strategic framing of policy issues. Lastly, I present the main hypotheses and expectations concerning context conditions, campaign conditions and party conditions driving the electoral strategies of political actors with respect to the dimensions and frames of the immigration issue.

The immigration issue: culture, economy, security

To test the abovementioned model, this book looks at migration affairs as a prototypical multidimensional issue field. Debates on this issue cut across several thematic fields, and the politicization of the issue has been subject to a conspicuous degree of variation across parties, contexts and over time (Feldblum, 1999; Helbling, 2013; Lahav, 2004; Lakoff and Ferguson, 2006; Messina, 2007; Messina and Lahav, 2006; Perlmutter, 1996; Vliegenthart and Roggeband, 2007; van der Brug et al., 2015). As I have illustrated earlier, although multiple issue attributes and problem definitions can coexist simultaneously within public agendas (Baumgartner and Jones, 2002), debates will generally not address all of the aspects, topics or dimensions that could possibly be used to define immigration. In particular, political and media narratives often simplify drastically the complexity of the issue and its implication in terms of migrants’ integration. The same applies for the justification of policy-making, since political actors have to rely on straightforward stories which can be explained in terms of cause and effect. As a result, debates on immigration have a structural tendency to ‘short-circuit’ the complexity of the issue (Boswell, 2011, p. 13). Based on previous research in this area, I argue in this section that multidimensionality emerges from three interrelated domains pertaining to the politics of immigration and integration: policy-making, public opinion and public debates.

To begin with, policy analysts have insisted on the disaggregation of immigration policy into distinct policy components (Lahav and Guiraudon, 2006). Baumgartner and Jones (2002) suggest that, although primarily defined by the problem of controlling borders, immigration policies have implications on a number of policy areas. The migration policy arena is made of numerous issue dimensions, ‘making immigration more similar to heath care policy (a complex policy arena with many ramifications) than to agricultural policy (a one-dimensional arena focusing primarily on the extent of subsidies offered to producers)’ (p. 74). In this sense, immigration takes on distinct dimensional definitions, which the authors classify as policies on border control and for the preservation of the national identity; policies addressing immigration as a labour resource for national industries; and policies looking at immigration through humanitarianism and oriented at the protection of the politically and religiously persecuted from other countries. Immigrati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Framework and context
• Part 2 Empirical analysis
• Part 3 Conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Appendix 4
• Appendix 5
• References
• Index