The Conveyance and Effect of the Asylum Abuse Policy Narrative in Direct- Democratic Campaigns
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The conveyance and effect of the asylum abuse policy narrative in direct- democratic campaigns David Kaufmanna & Laurent Bernhardb a KPM Center for Public Management, University of Bern, [email protected] b Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS), University of Lausanne, [email protected] Abstract In public and policy debates, asylum seekers are often portrayed as ‘bogus’ refugees or economic migrants who are accused of trying to abuse the country’s generosity and protection. We make use of the Policy Narrative Framework to systematize this accusation. We study the conveyance of the abuse policy narrative by political elite actors and the effect of this narrative on citizens’ opinion formation in the three most recent direct-democratic campaigns on Swiss asylum policies (2006, 2013, and 2016). We conducted and statistically analyzed over 108 structured interviews with all relevant campaign managers to analyze the conveyance of the abuse policy narrative and we analyzed post-vote surveys to examine the effect of this narrative for citizens’ opinion formation. We find that the more to the right a political organization is, the more this organization relies on the abuse policy narrative but only in referendums about tightening of asylum policies. We find similar results for citizens’ opinion formation as the asylum abuse policy narrative is crucial in tightening reforms for citizens from the center, the moderate right and was well the radical right. This conceptualized asylum abuse policy narrative can be used to study public debates about asylum policies beyond referendum campaigns and the findings offers clues about the use and the effect of the asylum abuse policy narrative in wider political debates. 1 Introduction The collapse of the Soviet Union, the communitarization of European asylum policy and high numbers of asylum seekers due to crises in close proximity to Europe motivated the formation of elaborated asylum systems in Western Europe (Hatton 2012; Zaun 2017). Periods of high numbers of asylum seekers and the politization of asylum policies by political actors from the radical right have contributed to the salience of asylum policies salient in Western European political systems (Bale 2008; Hatton 2009; Hatton 2012). Asylum policies in Western Europe are characterized by an agitated public, mobilized interest groups and partisan conflict (Freeman 2006, 238). In these public debates over asylum policies, asylum seeker are often portrayed as economic migrants and bogus refugees who are accused of trying to abuse the country’s generosity and protection. This popular accusation of abusing national asylum systems can be conceived as a policy narrative. In simple terms, the abuse policy narrative constructs a policy problem (i.e., the abuse of benevolent European asylum systems) and puts forward a policy solution to this constructed problem (i.e., tighter asylum policies). This kind of abuse policy narrative has been prevalent in the policy and public discourses about asylum policies in many asylum destination countries such as in the United Kingdom (Bloch 2000; Sales 2002; Schuster 2004; Schuster and Solomos 2004; Goodman and Speer 2007; Jennings 2010; Darling 2014), in Switzerland (Skenderovic 2009; Hänggli and Kriesi 2010), in the discourses about boat arrivals in Australia (Zagor 2015) as well as in the discourses about migration more generally in the United States (McBeth and Lybecker 2018). The distinction between refugees ‘worthy’ of protection and ‘bogus’ (economic) migrants as a central element of the narrative is enshrined in state policy practices as well as popularized in public discourse (De Genova 2002; Darling 2014; Skleparis and Crawley 2018). In this article, we consider the popular accusation that the majority of asylum seekers abuse national asylum systems as a policy narrative. Policy narratives can be studied by using a 2 heuristic proposed in the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) that structures policy narratives in four core elements: setting, characters, plots, and moral (Jones and McBeth 2010; Shanahan, Jones, and McBeth 2011; Shanahan et al. 2017). We contextualize the core elements of the NPF for our study of asylum policies in the Swiss direct-democratic campaigns. We study the conveyance of the asylum abuse policy narrative of political actors in direct- democratic campaigns on Swiss asylum policies as well as the influence of this narrative on citizens’ opinion formation. In the terminology of Shanahan et al. (2017), we combine a mesolevel with a microlevel analysis. Thereby, we want to contribute to current developments of the NPF as there is a growing interest in understanding the connectedness between the different levels of analysis (Crow 2012; Shanahan et al. 2017, 196). To link a mesolevel analysis of how elite actors convey policy narratives with a microlevel analysis of citizens’ opinion formation is described as an intriguing underdeveloped aspect of the NPF research (Shanahan et al. 2017, 197). Intensive public debates on asylum policies have repeatedly taken place in the context of Swiss direct-democratic votes (Bernhard 2012: 41-45). In the thirty-year period between 1987 and 2016, eight asylum-related propositions were placed on the ballot at the federal level. Political actors tactically use narrative elements to mobilize citizens to vote in Swiss direct-democratic campaigns (Schlaufer 2018). Thus, these direct democratic campaigns offer an opportunity to study who uses the abuse policy narrative, how it is used in the context of asylum policies, and how it influences citizens’ opinion formation. We thus address the central questions of the NPF, by asking “do narratives play an important role in the policy process?” (McBeth et al. 2014, 225). The empirical analysis is based on 108 structured interviews with campaign managers in advance of the three most recent referendums regarding federal asylum law in 2006, 2013, and 2016. In addition, we make use of VOX post-vote surveys to assess the effect of the abuse policy narrative on citizens’ opinion formation. We find that the role played by the abuse policy 3 narrative strongly varies across campaigns. More specifically, we find that the political elite actors convey the abuse policy narrative most often in the tightening reform of 2006, followed by the balanced reform of 2013 and the streamlining reform of 2016. The more to the right a political elite actor, the more likely this actor makes use of the abuse policy narrative in referendum campaigns on Swiss asylum policy. Similar results appear in the analysis of the effect of the abuse policy narrative on citizens’ opinion formation: The abuse policy narrative was more important for citizens’ opinion formation in tightening campaigns and it is important for citizens from the center, the moderate right, and the radical right. Abuse as a policy narrative Narratives are crucial for politicians, strategist, and media reporters given the importance of how a story is rendered for policy success (Shanahan et al. 2017). The NPF became the decisive framework for studying narratives in the policy process because it allows to study the construction of policy problems and their causes as well as their proposed solutions by means of a plot (Schlaufer 2018). Narratives are perceived as crucial parts of constructing policy realities and, thus, the NPF acknowledges the importance of social construction in the policy process (Stone 1989; Shanahan et al. 2017; Schlaufer 2018). As an important tool, the NPF offers a general structure of policy narratives that is generalizable over time and space (Jones and McBeth 2010; Shanahan, Jones, and McBeth 2011; Shanahan et al. 2017). This structure contains of four core elements. Frist, the setting accounts for the embeddedness of policy narratives in the specific institutional, geographical, legal, or economic context. Thus, the policy narrative depends on the specific policy context and what is perceived as the policy problem, which in turn relies on the social construction of policies. Second, policy narratives contains at least one character. “As with any good story, there may be victims who are harmed, villains who do the harm, and heroes who provide or promise to provide relieve from the harm and presume to solve the problem” (Shanahan et al. 2017, 176). Third, the plot 4 establishes the relationships between the characters and situates the characters within the policy setting. It serves as the arc of the action within the narrative. And fourth, the policy solution for the policy problems is the moral of the story. This structures allows to analyze and compare policy narratives in different policy contexts (Shanahan et al. 2017, 175-177). In the following, we use the structure of the NPF to theorize the abuse policy narrative in Swiss direct-democratic asylum campaigns. Given the context of direct-democratic campaigns and the contextual characteristics of the asylum policy subsystem, we discuss the setting element of the NPF structure in detail. The abuse message in itself, with regard to the characters, the plot and the moral of the story, is, however, rather simple. Overall, the abuse policy narrative employs an intentional causal mechanism narrative1 (Stone 1989; Shanana et al. 2017) since it strategically arranges narrative elements to assign blame to a large population of asylum seekers who are blamed to intentional abuse the asylum system. The abuse policy narrative puts forward that the complex problems in Western European asylum systems are caused by human actions. In this way, the abuse policy narrative is able to construct a policy problem that is amenable by policy intervention (Stone 1989). Such an intentional causal mechanism narrative, where the villain is engaging in intentional nefarious action, is often employed in intractable policy debates (McBeth et al. 2012). 1 Shanahan et al. (2017, 177-178) distinguish between three narrative strategies: scope of conflict, causal mechanism, and the devil-angel shift. Stone (1989) furthermore defines four causal mechanisms that can be applied to policy narratives: intentional, inadvertent, accidental, and mechanical.