Thursday, June 27, 2013
A1.18D (Oudemanhuispoort)
Existing studies on the policymaking of migration policy in Italy insist on the primacy of political actors. However, experts have been able to capitalise on some windows of opportunity, especially during centre-left governments. This paper intends to develop these insights by focusing on the policy-research structures underlying changes in the framing of immigrant integration in national policymaking. Even though Italy became an immigration country only in the mid 1970s, different policy framings of immigrant integration can be identified, from the de facto equation with Italian emigrants to ‘reasonable integration’, to the more recent ‘cultural shift’. Structures of research-policy dialogues in Italy will be reconstructed retrospectively in order to find out how dialogues have taken shape, which actors have been involved, in which venues and around what specific issues. The analysis shows how, independently of their changing structure over time, research-policy dialogues in Italy seem to be based upon informal relations between a restricted number of politicians on both sides of the political spectrum, and a similarly restricted group of experts from academia and/or civil society (especially Catholic NGOs), sharing a similar concern about the radicalisation of the anti-immigrant discourse of the Northern League since the early 1990s. More than politics per se, it is the belonging of experts and politicians to a similar cultural milieu, either of a Catholic or of a lay-reformist background, which accounts for the establishment of a dialogue between them.
