From Awareness to Action: Assessing the impact of issue salience on the strictness and inclusiveness of national migration policies in Europe

The interest surrounding the topic of migration has seen a steep increase over the last decade. Event like the refugee crisis of 2015 made the issue more salient among both citizens and political parties. Right-wing parties, often issue owners of the topic, have benefitted from this and have slowly grown in size and relevance. These parties usually opt for stricter and less inclusive migration laws by framing migration as a security issue and a threat to national identity. But how straightforward is this link? To investigate this, this paper tries to answer the following research question: “What are the effects of issue salience of migration on the strictness and quality of the policies thereof?”. By utilising a fixed-effects model to more recent datasets this paper finds that increased levels of public salience among citizens lead to overall stricter and more inclusive migration policies. Additionally, this paper finds that increased levels of attention political parties give to migration do not affect strictness and have a positive effect on the inclusiveness of migration policies.