Political communications strategy advice for other refugees’ rights advocates: focus on changing salience, not reiterating moral orientations.
This is my alternative interpretation of the polling evidence in this report:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/06/populists-in-europe-especially-those-on-the-right-have-increased-their-vote-shares-in-recent-elections
It’s topical again, unfortunately, because the populist-right and far-right made even more gains in Greece and Germany recently.
The CSU/CDU following the election results signalled that they’ll repeat and increase their old strategy of trying to win back AfD voters by adopting more of the AfD’s politics against refugees. Besides being morally repugnant and hypocritical for parties with ‘Christian’ in their names to do so, it’s also irrational about the facts.
But this post is addressed to other civil society activists for refugees’ rights.
Continuing to just express your (our) group's moral orientation/s about refugees and other migrants entering or attempting to enter by irregular means is very unlikely to make a difference to EU policies. I agree with y/our moral orientation/s, and I'm even more radical than average on that, but it's not effective, because it's a strategy based on false premises.
Why that campaign communications strategy doesn't work is because it doesn't address why EU executive leaders keep on ignoring us and doing what they want.
Why is that? The main argument they always give when they're talking among themselves*, not perceiving themselves to be in a mixed/ public audience, is that they're more afraid of the populist-right gaining even more power than they are of the predictable and known consequences. That's why they keep saying "it's the only way", out of fear.
(P.s. * example of how useful the false perception of privacy in high betweenness centrality networks can be for people in external networks to look in on. Another example would be Russian regime propagandists talking in Russian to each other routinely directly contradicting their international propaganda lines and themes (temnik) for the week.)
I heard this directly from two European Commission officers speaking at the Greek Asylum Service's conference in I think June 2016. You can also find it in Gerald Knaus' arguments for the EU-Turkey Deal 2.
Their assumption that if the populist-right or far-right gain majority control of more EU countries that it would be even more harmful to refugees and more harmful to everyone, incl. to citizens with voting rights, than their violent policies against refugees entering irregularly already are, to both, is probably true.
But their assumption that adopting the language and framing and values of the populist-right or far-right against refugees or migrants will bring them back to listening to and voting for center-right parties is false.
First, it evidently doesn't work: in the time since they've been doing this strategy (or experimental manipulation), for about 7 years now, supposedly to repatriate populist-right and far-right voters to the mainstream center-right parties, the populist-right and far-right voting and polling %s have kept increasing. (For the most recent examples, see Greece and Germany, but also France's latest presidential election.) So the experimentally manipulated variable (A) alignment between government policies against refugees and the values and policy preferences of the populist-right and far-right, has been increasing or continuing at a high level; while the expected effect: (B) repatriating populist-right voters to the center-right has decreased. That's the opposite of their expected results. When the supposed effect (B) doesn't even correlate in the same direction with the supposed cause (A), that disproves that causal hypothesis.
Second, it confuses two psychologically very different things: moral orientations and salience perceptions.
Moral orientations to foreigners immigrating who are not perceived as immediately instrumentally useful to the native population are very very inelastic and predictable over individual lifetimes and even over familial generations. It's more frequent or probable someone will decide they're transgender than change their mind about this. This is also why the campaign strategy of basically just repeat signalling our group's morality makes no difference, because it's not new information for EU policymakers. It's already included in their model and their corporate decision making process. They know we won't change our minds either.
Salience perceptions means how much relative importance people assign to an issue or a topic. Even for the topic of irregular immigration of people who are not universally perceived by the native population to be immediately instrumentally useful to them, salience perceptions are much more variable and malleable. This is a good example that moral orientations and salience perceptions don't always correlate. They're quite often independent dimensions.
It's not a conventionally good protest slogan but its very weirdness might actually grab attention and memory afterwards: 'moral orientations /= salience perceptions.' I.e. There's no real contradiction in saying that someone or a group is morally for or against refugees and the relative importance for them which they assign to that belief varies quite independently over time.
(Why moral orientations to refugees are so inelastic is probably because they're highly symbolic of whole systems of beliefs, identity, means of social knowledge about the world, & attitudes to uncertainty.)
What EU executive leaders really need to hear and it would be new information for them, if it got through their barriers of impervious smugness and rigid prestige hierarchy, is that the factual premise of their strategy is not true. It's empirically disproved as a causal nexus and it doesn't even really make sense in terms of the scientific knowledge about the subject.
Starting with their actual aim for their policies on this subject area, what the scientific information about the subject means is that decreasing salience perceptions of the issue and the topic among the populist-right would be more likely to achieve what they really want.
Talking more about the issue in terms of the populist-right's preferred framing language and values is likely to increase salience perceptions about the topic and lead to increased recruitment and mobilisation for the populist-right and then far-right.
(Also, in terms of social network dynamics: constantly inflating the public salience of the issue and adopting populist-right politics on it infuriates and coalesces the mainstream center-left and even far-left, which makes manipulating the societal cleavage on this even more valuable for populist-right strategists, because there's nothing that unites the right like owning the libs. So they keep on using it for leverage. Intergroup antagonism is self-perpetuating. It would be more likely to achieve their desired aim if they stopped adding fuel to this fire of antagonistic engagement.)
The inverse prediction from political communications science general theory also fits the data in this case: They've been making irregular immigration into a much bigger deal than it really is or necessarily has to be for the public for at least 7 years now, because they're trying to signal loyalty to the populist-right to win back their loyalty as voters for center-right parties, and in the same timeframe the voting and polling %s for the populist-right and far-right overall increased.
So in fact: B decreased while A increased, and this fits the alternative model that alignment causes increased salience which leads to recruitment and mobilisation. (See definitions of all terms above ^^.)
At the last available time point in the system to compare when there was a significantly different value of the same independent variable (A), the outcomes were very different: pre-EU-Turkey Deal, in 2015-16, before authority came down hard on the opposite side of the civil conflict of values and politics on this issue (so then most allistic, hypersocial people gave up on opposing the authorities), the Refugees Welcome movement across the EU was at its peak, and then it was about 3x bigger than the populist-right movement. So the alternative prediction also fits the data better.
We probably can't change EU executive leaders' values systems, rigid prestige hierarchy and impervious smugness, but we might have a better chance if we target the key factual premise their policy trajectory is based on: the assumption that compromising with the populist-right on refugees will win back their loyalty.
It evidently doesn't work causally and it doesn't even make sense theoretically in terms of scientific knowledge of the subject. So, even if their values and aims don't change, they should change their strategy for an alternative with a real chance of working.
