What’s the Fight All About? Politicising Immigration and Integration in Western Europe

The structure of political conflict in Western Europe is changing. Europe’s multiple crises in the last decade have reinforced the new cleavage between integration and demarcation and contributed to its deepening and permanence. A burgeoning literature adopting a dynamic cleavage approach has already confirmed this, and it has identified various political issues closely linked to the new divide: Apart from European integration and market liberalization, conflicts over immigration are of key importance and have become increasingly politicised in public debates across Western Europe in recent years. While we know that the so-called refugee crisis has led to a new upsurge in the immigration debates, we know much less about the reasons for this development. In the present paper, we take the analysis one important step forward by suggesting a more nuanced understanding of the specific issues and policies at the core of the conflict. More explicitly, we systematically differentiate aspects related to immigration from those related to integration. Our assumption is that certain issue constellations (e.g. asylum/refugees) may lead to more politicised conflicts but that these constellations may vary across countries. Thus, the recent rise in the politicisation of immigration may well be a common feature across Western European democracies, but the specific content of the debate may vary according to long-term discursive and political opportunity structures. For the empirical analysis, we rely on the PolDem dataset on national election campaigns and study the development in six West European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) from the 1970s up to 2018. The dataset is based on a relational coding of newspaper articles.