Work-package 2

← Retour à la page DIMIG

Contexte & Objectives

Current research in social sciences shows that immi­grants contri­bute to the society of their host country. Yet, immi­gra­tion is often perceived as a cultural, poli­tical and economic threat. While a large lite­ra­ture inves­ti­gates the deter­mi­nants of indi­vi­duals’ atti­tudes towards

immi­gra­tion, little atten­tion has been devoted so far to other stake­hol­ders of the public debate on immi­gra­tion, and to policy-makers in parti­cular. The work-package will fill this gap by studying the deter­mi­nants of the poli­tical discourses on immi­gra­tion, and how poli­tical discourses are related to immi­gra­tion flows.

Are poli­tical discourses driven by long-run trends in immi­gra­tion or by events such as the 2015 Euro­pean refugee crisis, the 2018 Aqua­rius crisis in France or more recently the Ukrai­nian crisis ? Are poli­tical discourses on immi­gra­tion chan­ging in elec­tion periods ?

Our research team will focus on the French context. We will combine methods in econo­mics and poli­tical sciences with natural languages proces­sing methods to extract infor­ma­tion from French policy makers discourses since the 1970s and evaluate the presence or not of a causal impact of immi­gra­tion on the poli­tical discourses.

Research team