Podcast - Political Science Matters

In this instalment of our Seminar Series on Migration and Ethnicity, Mireille Paquet of Concordia University, Montreal offers a synthesis of her research on federalism and immigration in Canada, Australia, and the United States.

In this instalment of our Seminar Series on the European Union, our speakers discuss issues surrounding the discursive and strategic coalitions in the European Parliament.

In this special, Methods Edition of our House Series, our panel provide reflections on questions around replicability and reproducibility and offer practical suggestions on how to produce replicable findings in quantitative and qualitative settings.

The relationship between corruption and migration has received very little scholarly attention until now. This talk will cover at least 10 ways in which migration and corruption can be interlinked. These linkages can be neutral, positive or negative. Migration can affect corruption but corruption can also affect migration.  The existing research can be broadly divided into three parts: First, it examines how corruption influences the decision of individuals to migrate. Second, it analyses how corruption facilitates (irregular) migration, including human trafficking and smuggling. Third, several studies investigate how migration and the sending of remittances influence levels of corruption in the country of origin. This talk will examine these areas and more both theoretically and in practice. 

What factors shape European and EU responses to potential Afghan displacement and refugee movement towards the EU? In this presentation, it will be argued that these responses form part of a repertoire of migration governance that is grounded in how European and EU governance systems as organisational processes make sense of international migration. Rather than international migration in its various forms being something that simply happens to governance systems – an external challenge – to which they respond, governance systems are shown to be powerfully constitutive of international migration through their actions and inactions and through the categories and classifications that are developed at borders and boundaries (typically of states). These repertoires, it is argued, are grounded in understandings of the normality of migration to Europe that prefigure responses to crisis.

Latin America has developed new mechanisms of migration governance since the turn of the century. For some, these represented a distinctive approach as, in contrast to trends in the Global North, the region put an emphasis on migrant rights, relatively open border control measures, multilateral efforts to facilitate mobility and coordinate policies, and non-criminalization of irregular migration. As migration dynamics have rapidly evolved and become increasingly complex in the last two decades (including a dramatic refugee crisis triggered by massive intra-regional displacement of Venezuelans since 2015), such approach has lately appeared less distinct from other regions and acquired new components and variants across Latin American countries. This presentation tackles such evolution, with an eye on the factors that induce or preclude policy convergence across the region. The analysis touches on several areas of migration governance, such as irregular immigration, border control, diaspora engagement policies, multilateral management of intra-regional mobility, and forced migration. Selected cases studies from Central and South America will be used to illustrate the main points.

This seminar presents a detailed analysis of the survey metadata retrieved through the newly created EMM Survey Registry (compiled through COST Action 16111 Ethmigsurveydata and the H2020 project SSHOC) for nearly 1,200 surveys focusing on the integration of EMMs across 24 countries in Europe. The study identifies the strengths and weaknesses of survey research in this field by paying attention to the survey and sample designs, the geographical coverage, the coverage of various subpopulations, the thematic coverage and the availability of documentation.

In our first-ever hybrid lecture, live streamed from Luiss University, Vivien Schmidt presents a Paper that, using discursive institutionalist analysis, theorises and investigates the varieties of populist anti-system ideas and discursive networks in Europe – with illustrative examples from EU and national level. This lecture was sponsored by the Journal of European Integration.

In this roundtable, leading scholars of the EU engage in a reflexive and prospective dialogue on EU policy developments since the start of the pandemic. We ask them whether the handling of the pandemic challenges existing scholarly understandings of the EU, the heuristics of their own work and could thus influence the research agendas of EU studies.