In the journal West European Politics, Frowin Rausis looks at Denmark’s desire to externalize asylum. Rausis opens with a controversial decision from 2021. That year, the Social Democratic government tabled a bill that would allow asylum seekers to be transferred out of Denmark to be processed and given protection. As Rausis puts it, “Witnessing a Social Democratic government embracing this highly controversial idea, even though less than a handful of right-wing governments outside Europe had previously outsourced asylum, is puzzling.” Though the idea dates back to the 1980s, it experienced a revival in the 2000s.
Rausis asserts that a desire to appear as problem-solvers drove this decision (after ruling out causes for the decision like technocratic learning and belief in the policy’s efficiency).
Rausis describes the “popular attention pathway”: when the mass media devotes significant attention to something, it can tempt decision-makers “to weigh responsiveness to their constituency higher than loyalty to their party ideology.” Between 2014 and 2016, immigration did indeed receive increased media attention in Denmark. Consequently, it is a key issue in political debate.
Justifying the Policy
To justify the policy, “mask its origins,” and resolve the inconsistency with the party’s own ideology, the Danish Social Democratic government took three steps.
Rausis asserts that a desire to appear as problem-solvers drove this decision.
First, they referred to policy advisors as the source of the idea, suggesting they were following experts’ lead. Though “empirical evidence” suggests this is not what happened, in acting as though it was, “they disguised their responsiveness to the perceived demand for restrictive policies as openness to expert knowledge and evidence-based policy-making.”
Second, they tried to cast externalization as humanitarian work, making the case not, as right-wing parties tend to, in nationalist terms, but by claiming, for example, that such a policy would spare asylum seekers from perilous migration journeys. This way, they could reassure voters with lip service to universalist ideas and gave it a way to withstand humanitarian and international criticism.
Third, they tried to change the narrative about their party’s identity, “claiming the prerogative regarding the dominant narrative on Social Democratic identity reflects also an attempt to forestall internal criticism.”
