The Unexpected Dynamics of Politicisation of Migration: The Case of the Refugee Crisis in Sicily

ABSTRACT

Through analysis of decision-making dynamics on migration in Sicily, this paper shows how party elites define strategies to politicize migration. Conventional explanations of the politicization of migration assume that party elites politicize migration in reaction to increasing flows and issue salience, explicitly ignoring cognitive factors and actors’ reasoning. Conversely, I show that Sicilian party elites’ politicization strategies are not shaped by objective evidence about public attitudes, salience and the effects of migration, but, rather, by actors’ understandings of these objective factors, embedded in deeply rooted narratives and reinforced by the outputs of the decision-making dynamics that they contribute to shape.

KEYWORDS:

• Politicization
• migration
• decision-making
• refugee crisis
• Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term ‘politicization’ is variously defined in the existing literature, for a review see: Grande et al. (2018).

2. Krosnick (1990, p. 60) defines issue salience as ‘the degree to which a person is passionately concerned about and personally invested in an attitude’ (for a more extensive review of the concept, see Dennison, 2019). Issue salience is typically measured in surveys by asking respondents what they consider to be the (two) most important issues or problems affecting themselves or their country (Dennison & Geddes, 2018, p. 5).

3. In this article I use the term ‘local political elite’ to refer to party actors within the Sicilian political system. The term is meant to refer to mayors, members of local and regional governments, national and regional MPs and the main party leaders (see Cochrane, 1998).

4. Furthermore, whilst in the past Southern Italy was mainly a pass-by area for migrants, the number of foreign residents in Sicily significantly increased in the last decade (Mastroianni, 2018), during which the agriculture sector increasingly became ‘a pull factor for irregular migration’ (Corrado et al., 2018).

5. At the national level, party positions on immigration of the main Italian parties (PD, M5S, Forza Italia) became more restrictive between 2012 and 2017 (Dennison & Geddes, 2019).

6. Local elections in Sicily were held in 137 municipalities. This sample includes all provincial capitals where elections were held and a representative number of towns and villages, selected to keep a balance between geographical areas, number of inhabitants and asylum-seekers hosted, type of reception centres.

7. Frames have been identifying consistently with Helbling’s typology (Helbling, 2014).

8. These exclude the main port towns (see previous paragraph).

9. SPRAR stands for ‘System for the Protection of Asylum-Seekers and Refugees’.

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.