The Domestic Discourses on Responsibility-Sharing by Political Elites

Responsibility-sharing, or the contributions states make to distribute the costs of enforcing immigration management and providing refugee protection between states, has become a cornerstone of European migration politics. So far, scholars find that responsibilities are unequally distributed between states, and that no effective mechanism of responsibility-sharing has been enforced. Moreover, European publics are deeply divided on this issue, both ideologically and across countries. However, most research takes preferences around responsibility-sharing as given and does not zoom into the (subjective) understandings key actors have of responsibility-sharing, and how they communicate those to other actors. Yet, this is surprising given the considerable evidence demonstrating that discourses surrounding migration and refugee protection play a key role in influencing policy preferences and policy outcomes. As a result, the paper asks how is responsibility-sharing framed by domestic political elites? The aim of the research is to shed light on political processes behind responsibility-sharing politics and better capture the construction of preferences across Europe. It employs a frames analysis of national parliamentary debates from three countries: Belgium, Poland, and Spain. More specifically, it analyses the diagnostic frames (= attributing causes for a policy problem) and the prognostic frames (= attributing solutions to a policy problem) employed by domestic elites, as a function of their country of origin and ideological affiliation.