Do Institutions Matter After All? An Actor-centred Analysis of the Institutionalisation of Migrant Integration Policy in Austria

Recent scholarly interest in the evolution of migrant integration as a policy field in Europe has granted most attention to the role of policies, less to that of governmental actors. Addressing this gap, our paper applies an actor-centred approach, showing how institutions matter to the governance of migrant integration. It presents a case study on Austria where after decades of repudiating the character of an immigration country, in 2011 a ‘State Secretariat for Integration’ was established as the first ministerial actor ever to address this topic exclusively. To evaluate the impact of the new actor in an otherwise consistent setting we compare government discourses and policies before and after the institutional shift. Our findings demonstrate how the institution’s new strategies and decisions are shaped by its need for legitimisation, by the pre-existing framework of governance, by the party political context as well as by the characteristics of the policy field.