A dilemma of visibility: discursive opportunities, audiences, and anti-migrant protest strategy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Why do collective actors sometimes choose not to expand their audiences, despite opportunities to do so? Combining Erving Goffman’s micro-sociological concept of audience segregation with social movement theory’s discussions of discursive opportunity, the article suggests that collective actors face a persistent dilemma between the benefits of growing audience reach and the difficulties of maintaining a coherent and credible front vis-à-vis an increasingly diverse audience. The argument is applied to a qualitative analysis of three different cases of anti-migrant protest from Sweden and from the wider EU. The cases consider how local protest campaigns respond to opportunities to reach national audiences, how the right-wing populist party Sweden Democrats (SD) chooses to engage or not engage with local campaigns, and how the pan-European Generation Identity (GI) decides to temporarily expand its communication toward a transnational audience. The analysis shows how actors’ responses to the dilemma generate very different effects out of similar and supposedly favorable discursive opportunities. The results contribute to the literature on anti-migrant protest specifically, and to the discussion of discursive opportunities generally.