The research plan seeks to address a major research question: what explains the intense salience of immigration in Western Europe throughout the 2010s? To address this question, this research plan proposed the development of two project proposals: a scientific project to present at the FCT call for research projects to study the politicization of immigration and the media effects on public attitudes towards immigration during the 2010s, and another research proposal focusing on political competition in social media to submit at the international level.  

Drawing on the theoretical framework developed by Van der Brug et al. (2015), the first research project of this plan consists of assessing and explaining the level of politization of immigration in Western Europe during the 2010s. The selected case studies are: Austria, Britain, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland. This comparative project will focus on political claims, which includes any kind of purposive political demand, proposal or comment made by a collective group in the public sphere that affects the interests of the claimant or another particular group (Koopmans et al. 2005). 

Politicization is conceived as being composed of two distinct dimensions: salience and polarization. The first corresponds to the number of political claims concerning immigration found in each article, which can contain more than one claim each. Based on agenda-setting literature, the number of identified claims made by collective actors indicates the overall importance of immigration in the domestic political agenda. Polarization refers to actors taking different political positions on immigration control and immigrant integration. Thus, an issue is politicized when it is both salient and polarized.  

The research privileges the claims made by political actors in newspapers (including a quality and a tabloid newspaper) selected from a random sample of days between 2010 and 2020, which will include the asylum crisis and the British referendum on the EU membership. The project distinguishes the hypothesis according to two analytical dualities: top-down and bottom up processes, as well as: structure and agency. The first dichotomy explores politicization as a process that is largely a spontaneous response to social developments, or whether we perceive of it as a process that is essentially top down, at least initially. The second duality considers whether the explanations are related with the agency of actors, or with structural conditions. Therefore, the project accesses four types of explanatory factors:  political opportunity structure, societal developments, initiatives by authorities, and actions of specific social movements (Van der Brug et al. 2015). 

Building upon the cross-national database of political claims analysis, this research project will assess the media effects on public attitudes towards immigration from 2002 to 2019 (Eber et al. 2018). The impact of the media on audiences has been conceived in terms of agenda-setting and framing. Through the employment of multilinear analysis, this plan will explore the assessment of the number of news and political claims related with immigration on public concern (measured by the most important issue in Eurobarometer surveys) and public attitudes towards immigration (variables included in European social Survey). Rather than assessing framing effects, this plan will innovate by evaluating the positive/negative tone of the political claims of political actors on the audience (Bleich et al. 2015).  

In the medium term, I will apply for a European Research Council Consolidator Grant to explore political competition on social media from a comparative perspective. A new era of political campaigning emerged after the emergence of Web 2. First, the political campaigns were contingent on the strength of the local party organizations. Then, political campaigning observed a shift from face-to-face contact to the communication through mass media channels. In the early 1900s, a new phase of campaigning that involved the employment of new communication technologies like the internet. The fourth wave of political campaigning was enhanced by the emergence of a new hybrid communication environment that includes a wide range of social media networks (Roemmele & Gibson, 2020). Therefore, this comparative research proposal will focus on this new era of political campaigning and address two research objectives: to assess the extent to which the emergence of web 2.0 enhances the equalization of political campaigning across mainstream parties; to map the political preferences expressed by mainstream parties in social network platforms.  

This research plan is associated with the SDG goal of reducing inequalities within and among countries, through the promotion of responsible policies of immigration control, as well as the effort to tackle prejudice and racism towards immigration.