A shift in politics: how populism influenced EU asylum policy implementation
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2021-08-16
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
The European Union has faced many challenges over the past years. One of these challenges has been the refugee crisis. Thousands of refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea and hundreds of thousands more had to seek asylum in Europe. This meant that the number of refugees entering the European Union surged significantly. Nevertheless, there were also European member states that refused to welcome any refugees at all. This created a sharp and unfair discrepancy. Many scholars have researched how this discrepancy had come into existence. One strand of literature suggests that this can be explained by the rising influence of populist parties. In an attempt to understand this process better, this thesis researched how populist parties had been able to influence EU asylum policy implementation during the refugee crisis. In order to answer this question, a theoretical mechanism was created, arguing that politicisation, pressure structures, normalisation, securitisation and strict law adoption were of great significance in this process. This mechanism was tested on the case studies of Germany and Austria. The results of this thesis show that even though the above-mentioned processes played an important role, populist parties were not able to influence EU asylum policy implementation in the strict legal sense, and therefore the mechanism could not be confirmed.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen