Responding to the ‘Refugee Crisis’ or Shaping the ‘Refugee Crisis’? Subnational Migration Policymaking as a Cause and Effect of Turbulence

Abstract

This article sheds light on the cognitive dimension of subnational migration policymaking, showing how policymakers’ subjective understandings of migration dynamics can decisively shape the responses of subnational political systems to migration. It also reveals that these responses, in turn, can play a decisive role in the emergence of policymakers’ understandings of migration dynamics, suggesting that policymaking processes can themselves produce meaning, constructing migration as a social and political problem. The paper illustrates these conceptual points by investigating the ‘heuristic case’ of three Italian regions that produced very different responses to the ‘refugee crisis’, drawing from 71 interviews with subnational policymakers.

Keywords:

• Policymaking
• Asylum
• Subnational
• Frames
• Italy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Prof. Andrew Geddes and the three anonymous reviewers for the very useful comments and feedback received.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Easton, 1965, p. 32.

2 Elster (1989) defines mechanisms as ‘continuous and contiguous chains of causal or intentional links between the explanans and the explanandum’. The concept is at the core of the so-called mechanism movement in the social sciences which, as Hedstrom and Wennberg explain (2017, p. 92), focuses on explanations, rather than causality, assuming that ‘establishing causal relations often serves an important role in developing explanations, but is rarely sufficient for arriving at an acceptable explanation’.

3 According to the ‘bounded rationality’ argument in the policy science literature policymakers have ‘cognitive limits’, work in ‘an unpredictable policymaking environment’ and have to face constraints on time, information and resources (Cairney, 2016, 10).

4 Cognitive frames or ‘frames in thought’ relate to ‘an individual’s (cognitive) understanding’ or ‘interpretation’ or ‘perception’ of a given situation (Druckman 2001, p. 228). In other words, to ‘the set of dimensions’ that guide individuals’ processing of information affecting the inferences they draw from them and their decisions (Entman 1993, p. 53), and therefore reveal the aspects of an issue an individual thinks are most important. From an interpretivist position, environments are not assumed to have any causal power independent of how individuals understand it: different actors can interpret the same external events differently (actors’ frames/understandings/interpretations are therefore ‘subjective’). Cognitive frames are different from the so-called ‘frames in communication’ or ‘strategic/policy frames’, used by individuals in public discourses (Druckman, 2011, p. 283). They are also distinct from individuals’ pre-established preferences, linked to their ideology, identity and past experiences (Bevir & Rhodes, 2006).

5 The Association of Municipalities (ANCI) and regional governments were also involved in asylum-seekers’ dispersal.

6 Boswell et al. (2011) define ‘migration policy narratives’ as ‘knowledge claims about the causes, dynamics and impacts of migration’.

7 The analysis conducted reveals the impact of policymakers’ understandings on their actions and the production of outputs and the impact of outputs on the emergence of policymakers’ understandings but cannot provide definitive conclusions on which effect came first. This is not problematic, if one assumes, from an interpretivist perspective, that structure and agency are co-constitutive and cannot be temporally separated (Hay, 2002).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by European Research Council (ERC), European Union’s Seven Framework Programme (FP-7/2007-2013), Grant Agreement No 340430 (‘Prospects for International Migration Governance’) awarded to Professor Andrew Geddes.