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 politicise migration. Conventional explanations of the politicisation of migration assume that party elites politicise migration in reaction to increasing flows and issue salience, explicitly ignoring cognitive factors and actors' reasoning. Conversely, I show that Sicilian party elites' politicisation 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.

Instrumental explanations of attitudes towards immigrants during the “refugee crisis”: Evidence from Italy

“…Images of large numbers of all kinds of people crossing the Mediterranean Sea, filtered through political propaganda, became a triggering factor for a generalised fear of dimished national and personal well‐being. Economic competition, especially at a sociotropic level, is then the factor that acquires greater relevance during the crisis, to the point that traditional patterns in the Italian context, such as the north–south divide on attitudes towards immigrants, are completely reversed, despite the fact that, at the elite‐level, politicisation was very low in Sicily (Pettrachin 2020). On the whole, Italians seem afraid of what they see as an insupportable burden on their economy and a threatening of material conditions, especially since economic pessimism due to the Great Recession still prevails.…”