Navigating the Immigration Policies and Discourses: Exploring the Perspectives of Social Democratic Party Leaders

Immigration policies have been a considerable source of conflict for social democratic from electoral, ideological and intra-party perspectives. Most European social democrats failed to provide convincing positions, exacerbating or causing the party family’s prevalent decline. While the literature extensively discusses the decline itself, further research is needed to explore how parties and intra-party actors navigate and articulate immigration policies and which specific aspects they emphasise. This article focuses on this research gap by categorising and analysing party leader speeches from party congresses of social democrats in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. Congresses provide fruitful grounds for understanding the party discourses as they both aim at the intra-party dynamics, i.e. activists and members, and the public discourse as these events are followed and publicised by the media for the general population. The methodological approach is qualitative, aiming to employ a two-dimensional conceptual framework to understand the discourse of the leaders from positioning (restrictive or expansive) and framing (pragmatic or principled) perspectives. Furthermore, this paper will categorise the aspects of immigration policy that the party leaders emphasise, such as social dumping, refugees, access to welfare, and citizenship. These findings will be analysed from the perspectives of ideological inclination and outlook of the social democratic parties, the salience of immigration, governmental participation, and the situation of the far-right parties in their respective countries.