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Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- Competing on migration at the local level -- Research design and methodology -- The structure of the book -- Notes -- References -- Part 1 Framework and context -- 2 Electoral debates on migration: a dimensional perspective -- Introduction -- The immigration issue: culture, economy, security -- Agenda setting, framing and dimensional competition -- Main hypotheses and expectations -- Conclusive remarks -- Notes -- References

Defence date: 9 December 2014 ; Examining Board: Professor Hanspeter Kriesi, EUI; Professor Rainer Bauböck, EUI; Professor Ruud Koopmans, Humboldt University; Professor Laura Morales, University of Leicester. ; This research focuses on the politicization of immigration as an issue in local electoral campaigns, comparing the cases of three Italian cities. Based on the idea that immigration must not be understood as a one-dimensional category that parties endorse or dismiss, support or oppose, I investigate its multidimensional nature, and the importance of local factors and opportunities in determining public debates. Focusing on the dimensional choices and framing strategies of competing electoral actors, I propose an account of the different constitutive dimensions of immigration debates, and suggest that parties - next to competing over different issues - also compete with one another by selectively and strategically emphasizing different aspects of the same social reality. In particular, I identify three main dimensions of the immigration issue - the socioeconomic, cultural and religious, and law and order dimension - and seven specific frames corresponding to the arguments and justifications mobilized by political actors to articulate support and opposition to immigration. The construction of public agendas in electoral campaign periods is measured through an empirical content analysis of the coverage of local elections by newspapers and of local parties' electoral manifestos across two campaigns in the cities of Milan, Rome and Prato (2004-2011). The results show not only that debates in different local settings deal with immigration in substantively different ways, but also that parties' electoral strategies rely upon the thematic structure of the issue, exploiting immigration dimensions in order to increase the accessibility and resonance of their messages among local electorates. The results of this dissertation offer one of the first comprehensive analyses of an issue that has too often been considered "emerging" in party competition, showing that when the issue cannot be dismissed, actors compete on its constitutive dimensions by mobilizing aspects on which they enjoy a strategic advantage. These findings pave the way to connect this field of research with other promising areas within the social and political sciences, such as public opinion research and the study of mediatization and communication in party politics, providing new insights into electoral politics and campaigning.

L'article interroge comment des savoirs experts produits « par le bas » participent au processus de politisation et de dépolitisation de l'action publique en matière d'immigration en France depuis 2017. Il compare l'expertise de groupes anti-migrants, qui sous le registre de la « crise migratoire » prônent un contrôle frontalier renforcé, à celle des mouvements solidaires qui dénoncent des pratiques étatiques au nom de l'accueil. La comparaison de ces mobilisations antagonistes fait émerger des similarités importantes dans l'usage des savoirs experts dans une politique migratoire construite sous l'angle du contrôle. Dans les deux cas, la constitution d'une expertise ne se traduit pas nécessairement par de la dépolitisation et apparaît comme une ressource politique ambivalente. Elle sert avant tout à ces mouvements d'outil de légitimation pour être audible dans l'action publique. Les anti-migrants se constituent en experts par mimétisme du langage et des codes techniques de leurs adversaires dans le but d'atténuer le caractère idéologique de leurs positionnements xénophobes qui autrement manqueraient de légitimité dans l'espace public. En revanche, les acteurs solidaires mettent en avant l'expertise acquise par l'observation et la participation à la gestion étatique de l'immigration afin de repolitiser l'action publique et revendiquer davantage de participation citoyenne.

When do the media cover far-right protests? News coverage matters for the entrenchment of the far right in contemporary democracies, but little comparative research has looked at what drives news attention to far-right mobilization. We apply a classic input–output process model of news selection bias to test the hypothesis that the visibility of far-right protests events depends on the characteristics of protest initiators, type of action, and reactions. We appraise this via logistic regressions on an original dataset of 5972 protest events retrieved from online press releases by far-right groups (input) and national quality newspapers (output) in 11 European countries (2008–2018). The analysis confirms that news media are particularly responsive to contentious action, protest around migration issues, and action–reaction chains between political opponents. Our findings shed light on the role of news organizations in the success of the far-right and on the pathways by which these movements shape public agendas.