Squaring the circle: domestic welfare,migrants rights,and human rights

Domestic welfare reform and the management of international migration in Britain have been described by David Cameron as ‘two sides of the same coin’. Heightened conditions and sanctions for the benefit-dependent domestic population, both in and out of work, are being harnessed as a means of promoting labour market change and reducing demand for low-skilled migrants – often EU workers, whose own access to benefit is being curtailed. Arguments about the post-national expansion of rights and associated cosmopolitan debate implicitly measure migrants rights against a normative model of citizenship as the yardstick of full social inclusion, but with little attention to how far citizenship itself falls short of this promise. Taking Britain as a case study, this paper considers how the concept of civic stratification can further advance analysis of the link between domestic welfare, migration and human rights in a context of intensifying controls for both migrants and citizens.     

Migration,citizenship, and the problem of moral hazard

Recent literature on international migration focuses on the benefits it confers on migrants in the form of better opportunities and living conditions, as well as on households receiving remittance. Although legal migrants in OECD countries often enjoy more rights than they would at home, this paper also looks at some of the negative aspects for sending countries. The paper uses two cases, the Philippines and Morocco, countries that have elaborated large-scale and successful policies to facilitate the export of labor and the flow of remittances. Despite decades of massive migration abroad, Morocco still has surprisingly poor social indicators, whereas the Philippines, despite much higher social indicators, has significant levels of poverty. Despite the long-term use of this development tool, migration, while opening up opportunities for people who leave home, maybe less positive for those who remain behind. Citing the views of migration experts as well as local voices, this paper examines some downsides of migration, including its use as a safety valve for discontent that may actually delay demands for needed domestic reforms that would broaden social rights at home.     

Changing your political mind: The impact of a metaphor on citizens’ representations and preferences for federalism

Federalism is often presented through metaphors, but little is known about the impact of such metaphors. Two experiments were conducted in Belgium presenting federalism as Tetris – with control and treatment groups – in order to grasp the influence of this metaphor. The first experiment reveals that being exposed to text with the Tetris metaphor influences respondents’ representations of federalism towards a more institutional representation and towards more regional autonomy. The second experiment confirms the importance of the text, and more specifically of the metaphor, if political knowledge is taken into account. Respondents with a lower level of political knowledge are those who are influenced by the metaphor, whereas respondents with a higher level are not. Therefore, framing the future of Belgian federalism using the metaphor of Tetris does matter: it affects both individuals’ representations of the federalization process and, consequently, their preferences vis-à-vis the institutional future of the country.     

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

Controlling immigration? How regulations affect migration flows

The aim of this article is to investigate whether or not and how immigration policies affect immigration flows. Such policy impacts have hardly been investigated so far as the necessary data is lacking. For the first time, two new datasets are combined to systematically measure immigration policies and bilateral migration flows for 33 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) destination countries from over 170 countries of origin over the period 1982–2010. The study finds that immigration policies have an important effect on immigration flows and thus that states are able to control their borders. To some extent the control capacities depend on other factors in attracting or deterring immigrants. The article shows that the deterrence effect of restrictive immigration policies increases when unemployment rates are high. It appears that, in these contexts, states start to care more about effectively protecting their national economy. Moreover, policies are more effective for migrant groups from former colonies or when the stock of this group is already high in a destination country. In these circumstances, information on border regulations are more easily disseminated, which in turn makes them more effective.     

Polish Labour Migrants and Undeclared Work in Norway

This article identifies how labour migrants’ participation in undeclared work is triggered by a combination of voluntary exit from the formal labour market in the host country as well as structures that makes it more likely for this type of worker to be forced to accept unregistered work. The argument is built by examining how East‐West European Union migration can foster or reinforce reasons for participating in undeclared work. At the EU level, the issue of undeclared work is seen as a mounting challenge, and public discussion now associates a supposed increase in undeclared work with the EU's open borders. For this study, 74 semi‐structured interviews were conducted with Polish labour migrants in Norway – both temporary migrants and more settled ones. A substantial part of these interviews focused on undeclared work. The results indicate that immigration enhances as well as creates new reasons for participating in undeclared work. In particular, they highlight how decisions to participate in undeclared work are not just an effect of labour market dynamics, but also a question of social integration.     

The Catholic Church in Poland on Muslims and Islam

ABSTRACT

The politicization of the increased influx of migrants to Europe in recent years, as well as Islamist terrorist attacks carried out in European cities, have led to a situation in which anti-Muslim sentiments have reached unprecedented levels. It is not only those European countries directly affected by the growth of the Muslim population that register increased generalized negative feelings towards that population, but also those that are home to very small and partially autochthonous Muslim populations, like Poland, which has not served as a transit point or a destination for the increased number of people arriving from Syria and elsewhere to claim asylum in Europe. P?dziwiatr’s article explores the ambiguity of attitudes in the Polish Catholic Church towards Muslims and Islam in these new circumstances. It examines both the Church’s official statements and the opinions of students in Catholic seminaries, which diverge significantly. When the positions of some of these present and future priests are communicated to the public, they contribute to a strengthening of hegemonic representations of Muslims as Others, rather than a deconstruction of them.     

Place-making: Chin refugees,citizenship and the state in Malaysia

Southeast Asia is a transit point as well as a point of destination for thousands of migrants and refugees. This is not new, as people movements in and through the region have a long and diverse history. However, the spaces for movement have been severely restricted by modern national borders and border protection enforcement. A significant part of the migration flows are made up of refugees. This is particularly so in Malaysia, which is currently home to approximately 200,000 refugees. The Malaysian government continues to resist outside and internal pressures to face up to and remedy the refugee crisis it increasingly finds itself in. As a result, refugees live in a liminal and extra-legal place in Malaysia, which makes any real engagement with the Malaysian body politic and Malaysians problematic. This paper traces the attempts at place-making by Chin refugees in Malaysia and their attempts to evade, confront and circumvent Malaysian authorities.     

Can Terrorism Abroad Influence Migration Attitudes at Home?

This article demonstrates that public opinion on migration “at home” is systematically driven by terrorism in other countries. Although there is little substantive evidence linking refugees or migrants to most recent terror attacks in Europe, news about terrorist attacks can trigger more negative views of immigrants. However, the spatial dynamics of this process are neglected in existing research. We argue that feelings of imminent danger and a more salient perception of migration threats do not stop at national borders. The empirical results based on spatial econometrics and data on all terrorist attacks in Europe for the post-9/11 period support these claims. The effect of terrorism on migration concern is strongly present within a country but also diffuses across states in Europe. This finding improves our understanding of public opinion on migration, as well as the spillover effects of terrorism, and it highlights crucial lessons for scholars interested in the security implications of population movements.     

Doing Politics: Journey to the Centre of the (Academic) Universe: 20 Steps on Getting Published in Journals

As postgraduate students, researchers or junior lecturers, we all aspire to climb the highest peaks of academic life, to bask in our reflected glory and to have the (small disciplinary) world at our feet. Yet how do we assail those peaks? More often than not, they seem like sheer cliff faces or mountain ranges where the noviciate assemble at the bottom and gaze skywards in disbelief. When we look around at academics who have successfully scaled those heights, it is obvious that an effective publication record is essential, where refereed journal articles are particularly prized. Yet the numbers who gather to attempt their own ascent ask the question – is there any straightforward publication route the beginner can follow? Surely we cannot all be left to cut our own path without really knowing where, how, or even whether we should be travelling at all? This article argues that writing academic journal articles has been mystified. For many wanting to get started, it seems like the final destination is a secret place, somewhere that you might stumble across but one where the locals jealously guard the short-cuts. Here we aim to de-mystify journal article writing and provide 20 steps for the prospective writer. These 20 steps, however, provide more a series of useful directions than a definitive map of the terrain. As beginning academics themselves, the authors are, at best, merely amateur cartographers.     

Sharing the burden in a free riders’ land: The EU migration and asylum policy in the views of public opinion and politicians

New divisions have emerged within the European Union over the handling of the recent migration crisis. While both frontline and favoured destination countries are called upon to deal with the number of migrants looking for international protection and better living conditions, no consensus has been reached yet on the quota-based mechanisms for the relocation of refugees and financial help to exposed countries proposed by the EU. Such mechanisms pose a trade-off for member states: the EU's response to the crisis offers help to countries under pressure, but it inevitably requires burden-sharing among all EU members and a limitation of their national sovereignty. Within this scenario, the article compares how public opinion and political elites in ten different EU countries view a common EU migration policy grounded on solidarity and burden-sharing. By tracing both within- and cross-national patterns of convergence (and divergence), the article shows that contextual factors influence policy preferences, with support for solidarity measures being stronger in countries with higher shares of illegal migrants and asylum seekers. While individuals’ predispositions, identity and ideological orientations account for both masses’ and elites’ attitudes towards burden-sharing measures, subjective evaluations and beliefs concerning the severity of the crisis provide additional and alternative explanations when looking at the public's preferences. In particular, it is found that concern about the flow of migrants to Europe consolidates the impact of contextual factors, whereas the overestimation of the immigrant population fosters hostility against solidarity measures, with both effects more pronounced as the country's exposure to the crisis increases. In the light of these results, the main implication of this study is that EU institutions have to primarily address entrenched beliefs and misperceptions about immigrants to enhance public support for a joint approach to migration.     

Can George dance? Biosemiotics and human exceptionalism with a lyrebird in the viewfinder

Are the movements of the Australian Albert’s lyrebird “George” best identified as dance, “dance,” proto-dance, or functional gestures? I draw on the tools of biosemiotics to shed light on human signifying practice vis-à-vis dance – specifically, how humans make sense of avian dance, how they compare and contrast it with human dance, and what a definition tells us about its makers. In both the natural sciences and humanities, competing discourses abound to the contention that animal movements could fruitfully be considered as dance. A trend emerges in some definitions of dance (which may also invoke human exceptionalism) of characterizations that ignore extant reports of animal abilities – of a classificatory rather than an evaluative posture. I argue that in overcoming the limitations of human exceptionalism in analytic frameworks by explicitly incorporating animal efforts into theory development, validation, and revision (theories often dominated by human and elite Western concerns), we will arrive at a less-distorted version of the multimodal behavior we call dancing.     

Inside versus outside lobbying: How the institutional framework shapes the lobbying behaviour of interest groups

Different types of interest groups use different lobbying strategies. This article presents an investigation of this already well‐established hypothesis once more, but additionally proposes that the institutional framework of the country in which interest groups operate also influences their lobbying behaviour. More specifically, it is shown that groups working in the interest of the public are better integrated into the policy‐making process when direct democratic instruments, such as referendums, occur regularly (as in Switzerland) than when referendums are the exception (Germany). The article demonstrates that Swiss cause groups – often also referred to as ‘public interest groups’ in the literature – use a more balanced mixture of insider and outsider strategies than their German peers, but also that this moderating effect cannot be found for specific interest groups, such as industry groups or unions.     

Missing the overlap between theory and practice: Patten’s ‘equal recognition’ in the face of the Catalan case

Drawing on the particularities of Catalonia (and related cases), the general point of this contribution is to argue that Patten’s equal recognition theory is modeled upon a too-restricted set of empirical assumptions, a circumstance that might harm its value as a tool for the orientation, evaluation, and reform of public policy. What is absent in Patten’s account – or at least not properly inserted into it – are four built-in modules that we have named ‘history’, ‘democracy’, ‘international relations’, and ‘migration’. When it comes to recognition of minorities, the past matters more often than Patten is willing to accept; democracy can lead to permanent departures from equal recognition on the part of self-governing national minorities; in the recognition game, there are other relevant players than simply states and their minorities; and one of these players, namely immigrant groups, can (albeit involuntarily) distort equal recognition schemes.     

Values,imaginaries and templates of journalistic practice: a Critical Discourse Analysis

This article shows that templates are not only crucial for the ways in which journalists construct or structure the media discourse but also for how they perceive themselves and others in the process of journalistic practice. A Critical Discourse Analysis of interviews with Polish journalists on their practices related to reporting migration – a topic largely discarded and ignored by the Polish media – shows that the construction of practice in the journalistic field constantly negotiates the contradiction between “knowing-it-all”, a key element of the template of journalistic habitus/identity, and the frequent lack of experience or limited knowledge of practice and of journalistic work. The analysis reveals that, while often using a discursive strategy of pre-legitimation, journalists enact templates that blur the boundaries between discourses about experiences of journalistic work and imaginaries or scenarios of actions they would only potentially undertake. Journalistic discourses of practice thereby become increasingly displaced, that is, they run along similar templates of discourse of/about quasi-universalised ethics and values of journalism almost irrespective of media organisations of the informants. By the same token, it is emphasised that, rather than being limited by the ideologies and powers of media organisations, agency seems to be often self-constrained by journalists in their self-entrapment in values, templates and imaginaries of journalism.     

One of the Boys? Gender Similarities and Differences in Human Capital among Senior Civil Servants in Denmark

Studies have shown how women are underrepresented in senior executive positions in public and private organizations. Equal representation matters both for reasons of performance and legitimacy, and, to understand the mechanisms behind the glass ceiling, we explore if the women making it to the top of the Danish civil service differ from the men who do so. We want to understand if senior executive positions require something different of women than men. Using a dataset consisting of the entire career trajectory of all senior civil servants in Denmark, we find that, on numerous human capital dimensions, the women and men making it to the top are quite similar, for example, in terms of tenure and educational level. However, we find on the one hand that men are more often employed in the most prestigious departments and, at the same time, it seems that men with a profile deviating from the norm are more likely to make it to the top than women. This may indicate that the most prestigious positions – also in terms of early-career positions – are less accessible to women, and that women are less willing to apply for jobs outside their usual domain, or that those responsible for recruitment are less willing to take a chance on a woman with a slightly unorthodox profile. Hence, our study indicates that greater interest should be paid to the dynamics keeping women at lower levels of the hierarchy and possibly to encourage them to apply for top positions.     

The Role of “Parallel Institutions” in China’s Growing Participation in Global Economic Governance

China is creating or co-creating new international economic institutions in areas such as trade, development finance, currency settlement and credit rating that parallel those that arose out of the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 or are tied to the interests of rich, developed countries. What are its reasons for doing this? What are the characteristics of the new institutions? How do the new institutions relate to the old institutions? Will China’s initiatives lead to better global economic governance? This paper attempts to answer these questions. Its main conclusions are that China is trying to create a new international economic order in which its political power is more commensurate with its economic power, its creation of new international institutions is an important part of this strategy, the institutions that China is creating are meant to be open and inclusive and to introduce “better practices”, and it is possible – though not necessarily probable – that China can make a major contribution to global economic governance provided it can overcome operational challenges, skepticism about its intentions and too narrow a view of its national interest.     

Temporary legislation,better regulation,and experimentalist governance: An empirical study

This article presents the findings of an extensive multi‐method empirical study that explored the relationship between temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance. Temporary (or “sunset”) legislation – statutory provisions enacted for a limited time and set to expire unless their validity is extended – is often hailed as a key tool for promoting experimental and better regulation. Despite the importance of temporary legislation and the burgeoning theoretical scholarship on the subject, there is still a dearth of empirical studies about how temporary legislation is used in practice. The lack of empirical evidence creates a lacuna in at least three areas of theoretical scholarship, concerning temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance. This paper is a first step to fill this gap.     

Large‐scale solidarity? Effects of welfare state institutions on the admission of forced migrants

The variation among countries when it comes to the admittance of forced migrants – refugees and asylum seekers – is substantial. This article explains part of this variation by developing and testing an institutional explanation to the admission of forced migrants; more precisely, it investigates the impact of domestic welfare state institutions on admission. Building on comparative welfare state research, it is hypothesised that comprehensive welfare state institutions will have a positive effect on the admission of forced migrants to a country. There are three features of comprehensive welfare state institutions that could steer policies towards forced migrants in a more open direction. First, these institutions have been shown to impact on the boundaries of social solidarity. Second, they enhance generalised trust. And third, they can impact on the citizens’ view of what the state should and can do in terms of protecting individuals. The argument is tested using a broad comparative dataset of patterns of forced migration, covering 17 OECD countries between 1980 and 2003. This analysis shows that comprehensive welfare state institutions have a significant positive effect on the admission of forced migrants, under control for a number of factors often highlighted in migration research.     

Fast thinking: Implications for democratic politics

A major programme of research on cognition has been built around the idea that human beings are frequently intuitive thinkers and that human intuition is imperfect. The modern marketing of politics and the time‐poor position of many citizens suggests that ‘fast’, intuitive, thinking in many contemporary democracies is ubiquitous. This article explores the consequences that such fast thinking might have for the democratic practice of contemporary politics. Using focus groups with a range of demographic profiles, fast thinking about how politics works is stimulated and followed by a more reflective and collectively deliberative form of slow thinking among the same participants. A strong trajectory emerges consistently in all groups in that in fast thinking mode participants are noticeably more negative and dismissive about the workings of politics than when in slow thinking mode. A fast thinking focus among citizens may be good enough to underwrite mainstream political exchange, but at the cost of supporting a general negativity about politics and the way it works. Yet breaking the cycle of fast thinking – as advocated by deliberation theorists – might not be straightforward because of the grip of fast thinking. The fast/slow thinking distinction, if carefully used, offers valuable new insight into political science.