https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7238-9631
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ABSTRACT
This article develops and applies an innovative methodology based on social network analysis and cluster analysis to analyze the organization of policymaking relations in multi-level political systems, focusing on the migration policy field. In doing so, it addresses four limitations of existing research on multi-layered migration policymaking, which tends to focus on policy and legal documents rather than real-world interactions, conceptualize governmental levels in morphological terms, neglect conflictual interactions, and narrowly focus on big cities. This innovative approach is applied to the heuristic case of Italian asylum policy after the 2015 “refugee crisis”, which allows to derive three conceptual claims about the organizations of multi-level migration-related policymaking interactions. First, these interactions can be highly conflictual and multi-level migration policymaking should not necessarily be seen as a negotiated order among public and non-public actors. Second, existing typologies need to be complexified, accounting for the significance of intricately nested and overlapping “multi-level networks” emerging over and above multi-layered institutional structures. Third, showing that Italian asylum policy actors interact more frequently and collaboratively with “like-minded” actors regardless of official roles and governmental levels, the article identifies a new “political” or “ideological” axis along which collaborative and conflictual relations can be organized.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Prof. Tiziana Caponio and Dr Maria Schiller for their very helpful comments on a draft of this paper. Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and detailed comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Few municipalities were controlled by the populist Five Star Movement. Many municipalities (especially in rural areas) are governed by independent local governments.
2 These are intended as exchanges related to asylum regardless of the stage of the policy process in which they take place (e.g., policymaking or policy implementation) and regardless of which actor started the exchange.
3 Interviewees were asked whether based on such exchanges the perspectives of their organization/institution and the interacting organization/institution on the asylum issue were perceived by them as similar or conflictual (scale: 1–5).
4 The merging strategy entailed selecting the maximum value for the frequency of interactions, and the average value for the quality of interactions.
5 Local governments of towns/villages hosting hotspots or one of the few huge Italian “refugee hubs” (i.e. centres hosting > 1000 asylum-seekers) were included under separate categories.
6 Data were combined calculating average values (for both categories of interaction).
7 The weight of each edge was calculated as the average of the average values calculated for the same edges in each region.
8 I was not interested in the direction of exchanges but on their mere existence.
9 The partition of the network produced by this algorithm is not unique. I ran the algorithm many times to identify boundary nodes. The division in clusters described by the figures is the one that was more frequently generated by the software (resolution = 1).
10 Actors’ approaches or positions on asylum policy were identified through the semi-structured interviews. Expanding on this specific aspect goes beyond the scope of the article.
11 These actors – the interviews conducted clarify – mobilize to criticize the management of the reception systems by both local and national governmental actors (and develop autonomous initiatives to provide direct assistance to asylum-seekers)
12 As for Caponio's typology, those described in are ideal types and real-world configurations might well have mixed characteristics.
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Andrea Pettrachin
Andrea Pettrachin, PhD, is Postdoctoral Researcher at Collegio Carlo Alberto (Italy) where he is working with Prof. Tiziana Caponio on the scientific coordination of the H2020 Whole-COMM Project. Before, he worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute. He holds a PhD in Politics awarded in 2020 by the University of Sheffield, supervised by Prof. Andrew Geddes. His research focuses on the interplay between migration governance, politics and policymaking. He has published on various international journals, including the Journal of European Public Policy, Territory, Politics, Governance, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the International Migration Review, the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, the Journal of Refugee Studies, Mediterranean Politics and several others. He has also recently contributed to the LSE Blog EUROPP, The Loop, The Oxford Compass Blog, the Mideq Blog.