A system in chaos? Knowledge and sense-making on immigration policy in public debates

Abstract

This article shows how press selection and presentation of knowledge and expertise relate to processes of sense-making over contemporary political dilemmas. It develops an approach that combines framing analysis with theoretical insights from the literature on narrative and complexity. It demonstrates the value of this approach through quantitative and qualitative analysis of media coverage of the UK government’s decision-making over access to the labour market for new European Union (EU) citizens in 2006. The findings illuminate the relationship between expertise and complexity, the partisan way in which the media utilize expertise, and how official and non-official sources relate to certainty and uncertainty over policy. The article also contributes to our understanding of how intense media scrutiny can shape public debates on immigration, where ‘moral panics’ are often accompanied by calls for government intervention, and the supposedly rational world of facts and figures is distorted into a ‘numbers game’.