Elites and the ‘organised public’: Who drives British immigration politics and in which direction?

This article examines the role of the ‘organised public’, collective action by interest groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), in British immigration politics. The impact of the ‘organised public’ on policy outcomes has been a subject for theoretical speculation, especially by Gary Freeman. Here the authors test some of Freeman's assumptions regarding what political mechanisms could account for what he sees as a persistent ‘gap’ between expansionist policies and restrictive public opinion through recourse to original empirical evidence. Their findings largely go against Freeman's predictions. Immigration is an elite-led highly institutionalised field with a relatively weak level of civil society engagement. Elites dominate the field and hold a decisively restrictionist stance. This points toward an explanation where the direction of immigration policies is not an outcome of an organised pro-migrant lobby winning over a resource-weak diffuse anti-migrant lobby, as Freeman suggests, but determined in a relatively autonomous way by political elites.

Acknowledgement

Economic and Social Research Council award R000239221 is gratefully acknowledged plus assistance by Manlio Cinalli and Emily Gray.

Notes

1. Against ‘postnationalism’: First, human and personhood rights obligations do not originate from supra- and transnational bodies, but are primarily an act of self-limiting sovereignty by nation states (Joppke 1998), acting within international and multi-levelled politics. Second, the power balance between supra- and transnational legal rights regimes versus nation states lies strongly with nation states (Guild and Harlow 2001), and inter-governmentally within the EU. Thirdly, the postnational image of supra- and transnational institutions' and discourses' actions is empirically inaccurate both regarding their normative contents and scale (Koopmans and Statham 1999a).

2. While content analyses study how the media frames events, claims-making analysis examines the news coverage of claims-making by non-media actors. Following ‘protest event’ analysis (Rucht et al. 1998), the unit of analysis is not an article, but an individual instance of claims-making. The 15-year continuous sample is from the news section of Monday, Wednesday and Friday editions of the Guardian, from 1990 to 2004. All claims-making acts related to immigration policies with political relevance to British territory are included, even if the actor making the demand, or its addressee, is located outside the UK.

3. For using Mobilisation over Ethnic Relations Citizenship and Immigration (MERCI) data we thank Koopmans, Giugni and Passy.

4. Anti-immigrant actors that are marginalised from the policy domain, and for which this technique is not suited, were excluded.