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Opening the ‘Black Box’ of asylum governance: decision-making and the politics of asylum policy-making

Part of: IPSR-RISP Migration collection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2019

Andrea Pettrachin Open the ORCID record for Andrea Pettrachin [Opens in a new window]
Andrea Pettrachin*
Affiliation:
Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute, Firenze, Italy University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: andrea.pettrachin@eui.eu
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Abstract

Complementing and challenging the existing literature on the Italian asylum crisis, this article develops an actor-centred approach to open the ‘black box’ of asylum governance, showing the constitutive effects of governance on the asylum issue. It then applies this approach to the case of the Veneto region in Italy during the recent ‘refugee crisis’. By doing so, the article, first, investigates the cognitive mechanisms that shape key actors’ asylum policy decisions. Drawing concepts and ideas from framing and sensemaking theories, it shows that, while there is certainly a strategic element that shapes actors' policy preferences, there is also a meaningful cognitive component in asylum governance. Indeed, it argues that actors' strategies are shaped, more than by anti-immigration public attitudes per se (as often assumed), by how political actors make sense of these attitudes. The article then applies SNA to examine how actors' understandings are located within and depend upon network relations and investigate actors' agency, power and interactions. It ultimately shows that local asylum policy outcomes are deeply influenced by the ‘politics of policy-making’, that is by power dynamics and how powerful actors position themselves, behave and mobilize their understandings. Finally, by examining the impact of policy outputs on cognitive micro-level mechanisms, the article sheds light on the interplay between the ‘regulatory’ and the ‘public reaction’ dimensions of the Italian asylum crisis, illustrating the relationship between public attitudes on migration, frame emergence, asylum policy-making, politics and public mobilizations in the active constitution of the Italian asylum crisis.

Keywords

Asylum governanceItalymigration politicspolitical partiesrefugee crisis
Type
Research Article
Information
Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 191 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Società Italiana di Scienza Politica 2019

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Footnotes

The original version of this article was published with missing information from the author's affiliation and the financial statement. A notice detailing this has been published and the error rectified in the online PDF and HTML copies.

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