Representations of Migration in a Transforming Europe
The Polarising Power of Migration as a Political Tool in Online Media and Political Discourses – What can we learn from the 2015 and 2022 refugee crises?
A research project supported by CELSA Research Fund
Period of support: September 2023-September 2025
Principal Investigator: Ildikó Barna
Participants: Jakab Buda, Márton Gosztonyi, Renáta Németh
Summary
The overarching aim of this research is to map the representation of migration in the Hungarian and Belgian online political and media sphere and identify various forms of language polarisation against a backdrop of transformation. To achieve this research aim, we plan to analyse the different layers of migration-related political discourse, including the official channels of communication (e.g., comparison of Facebook and Twitter discourse of politicians depending on the target group, parliamentary speeches and questions), the online mainstream press, and user-generated contents (e.g., tweets [Belgium], online discussion forums of news sites [Hungary]). In the following, we will refer to the latter layer as lay channels of communication to distinguish between professional (official or press) and non-professional (lay) communication. We not only intend to analyse the inner discursive content and dynamics of these layers but, more importantly, the interactions and the diffusion processes between them. Moreover, we plan to triangulate these discursive processes with existing and new polling data to gain a deeper understanding of the interactions between political and media discourse as well as public opinion. Figure 1 visualises the basic structure of our research.
The project scrutinises two very different events: the 2015–2016 European migration crisis and the migration due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Moreover, the project compares two EU Member States, Belgium and Hungary, that are very different from one another with regard to their media systems, their attitudes towards migration and EU law, and their experiences with both crises. We see the planned comparison as a pilot study for a future project spanning across more or even all EU countries. Furthermore, since Belgium is a multilingual country, a more nuanced picture of the comparison of multiple languages will emerge during this study. While both events caused large groups of refugees to arrive in Europe, their reception has been very different (Hadj Abdou et al., 2022; Mascareñas, 2022; Moise & Oana, 2022). This difference was partly due to the different geographical proximity, and the cultural and ethnic similarity of the arrivals. But there are other factors behind the differences. While in the 2015–2016 refugee crisis, most arrivals were adult men, in the Ukrainian crisis, they were primarily women and children. The latter crisis has generated much more solidarity and compassion, and the Russia-Ukraine war is much more likely to trigger Europeans’ perception of the arrivals as “genuine refugees”.
The project adopts an innovative methodological approach that combines computational text analysis of different layers of political discourse (official, press, and lay) with network analysis and the analysis of latent opinion climate (polling data) to address the issue in the two research scenes. Building on a unique combination of methods, this project will develop an exceptional interdisciplinary framework for the representation of migration with state-of-the-art computational methods. These results not only lead to scientific advances but also directly benefit European policy, migration management being a key issue for the EU. These analyses will enhance our understanding of the extent and locus of polarising political communication and will provide an opportunity to highlight hidden emancipatory potentials of the online public sphere capable of transcending these shortcomings and, therefore, can contribute to the societal impact and relevance of our research.