Abstract
Narratives are increasingly cited by scholars, international organisations, NGOs, and governments as one of the most powerful factors in migration politics and policymaking today. However, narratives are typically conceptually underspecified, with relatively little known about why some narratives become publicly popular or the nature of their effects. This article reviews recent scholarly advances to specify what narratives are and to offer a novel theoretical framework to better explain variation in their public popularity and effects. It is argued that the popularity of a narrative, defined as a generalisable, constructed and selective depiction of reality across time, is determined by a combination of contextual factors, such as issue complexity and salience, the plausibility of the narrative and the traits of the recipient of the narrative. These findings are relevant for policymakers and, particularly, communicators. However, although significant work has gone into explaining how narratives affect migration policymaking, the often-assumed effects of narratives on attitudes to immigration and migration behaviour have rarely been robustly tested.
Highlights
Narratives are regularly cited by migration policymakers and communicators as some of the most important determinants of public attitudes and behaviour regarding migration and a powerful source of our perceptions and misperceptions
One potential to reverse this trend has been presented by the most recent 2017– 2020 wave of the World Values Survey (Haerpfer et al, 2020) across 47 countries, which asks about agreement with ten migration narratives: the extent to which immigration in one’s country has “filled important job vacancies”; “strengthened cultural diversity”; “offered people from poor countries a better living”; “given asylum to political refugees who are persecuted elsewhere”; “increased the crime rate”; “increased the risk of terrorism”; “increased unemployment”; and “lead to social conflict”
Narratives are increasingly cited by international organisations, NGOs and governments as one of the most powerful factors in migration policymaking today
Summary
Narratives are regularly cited by migration policymakers and communicators as some of the most important determinants of public attitudes and behaviour regarding migration and a powerful source of our perceptions and misperceptions. Narratives differ from other related concepts, such as hypotheses—testable propositions about highly specified relationships rather than generalisable depictions of reality that are argued to hold true over multiple contexts—or propaganda—the function of which is to persuade and influence rather than make sense of complex reality by emphasising the importance of certain causal relationships—or fake news—false or misleading information presented as specific context- and timespecific news, unlike a narrative which may be partially verifiable and is applicable to many situations.
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