Between Numbers and Political Drivers: What Matters in Policy-Making

This chapter aims to investigate whether (restrictive) policy measures on migration across seven European countries (the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and the UK) are better explained by political factors, rather than the actual number of migrants/refugees/asylum seekers, their integration process or the effective European societies’ demographic and economic needs, within each national context. The analysis shows, indeed, that restrictive legislative and policy measures on immigration and integration issues seem to be not justified by the reality of immigration in the selected European countries. Conversely, these restrictive measures can be explained by some relevant political factors: prevalence of negative attitudes towards immigration among European citizens and salience of the immigration issue; electoral relevance of populist radical-right parties who mostly mobilized on immigration issues and significant diffusion of their authoritarian/traditionalist/nationalist positions within each country’s party system. These data confirm that citizens’ perceptions and party systems’ features are closely related phenomena, which influence one another and are all key factors that need to be considered to explain the law and policy-making of recent years on immigration issues.