Migration Discourse in Sweden: Frames and Sentiments in Mainstream and Social Media

Victoria Yantseva

doi:10.1177/2056305120981059

Abstract

This study undertakes a systematic analysis of media discourse on migration in Sweden from 2012 to 2019. Using a novel data set consisting of mainstream newspapers, Twitter and forum data, the study answers two questions: What do Swedish media actually talk about when they talk about “migration”? And how do they talk about it? Using a combination of computational text analysis tools, I analyze a shift in the media discourse seen as one of the outcomes of the European refugee crisis in 2015 and try to understand the role of social media in this process. The results of the study indicate that messages on social media generally had negative tonality and suggest that some of the media frames can be attributed to a migration-hostile discourse. At the same time, the analysis of framing and sentiment dynamics provides little evidence for the discourse shift and any long-term effects of the European refugee crisis on the Swedish media discourse. Rather, one can hypothesize that the role of the crisis should be viewed in a broader political and historical context.

Highlights

In 2015, Sweden welcomed more than 162,000 asylum seekers into its territory (Migrationsverket, 2020), an unprecedented number in the history of this relatively small Scandinavian nation that can, boast of 17% of its population being born abroad (Statistiska Centralbyrån, 2016)
The results of topic modeling suggest that the migration frames can be divided approximately into three big groups: these are politically oriented frames (“Swedish politics,” “The European refugee crisis,” “International relations,” “The crisis in the Middle East,” “Illegality and the asylum process,” and “Humanitarian crisis”), economically oriented frames (“The cost of immigration” and “Municipalities and welfare”), and socially oriented frames (“Crime,” “Racism and multiculturalism,” “Religion,” “Begging,” “Families,” ”Migration debate,” “Media,” “Races and ethnic groups,” “Integration,” and “Hate”)
Judging from the terms identified in the latter frame, one might conclude that it discusses forced migration as an illicit and potentially harmful phenomenon

Summary

Introduction

In 2015, Sweden welcomed more than 162,000 asylum seekers into its territory (Migrationsverket, 2020), an unprecedented number in the history of this relatively small Scandinavian nation that can, boast of 17% of its population being born abroad (Statistiska Centralbyrån, 2016). The analysis of the discourse dynamics in Germany and the United Kingdom demonstrated, for instance, that news framing shifted from a humanitarian perspective to threat and securitization dimensions during this period (Chouliaraki et al, 2017; Goodman et al, 2017; Vollmer & Karakayali, 2018). Likewise, another comparative study of the media coverage of the crisis in five European countries showed that humanitarian and threat narratives were widely used in the mainstream media to contextualize the crisis (Berry et al, 2016). Researchers pointed out that a fragmented and inconsistent media discourse about the refugee crisis was characterized by twofold tendencies of humanitarianism and protectionism, which represented a crisis in itself (Moore et al, 2018, p. 66)

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