The rising of García Albiol: Politicization of the migration discourse and implementation of the agenda setting theory in 2011 local elections

Abstract

This article takes a communication perspective to analyze how political leaders and media use different technical and discursive tools to situate the claims ascribed to the phenomenon of immigration within the broader pre-electoral and electoral discourse, nurturing what we have called its politicization.
The study focuses on two municipalities of the so-called red belt of Barcelona (municipalities surrounding the capital and generally ruled by the left): Badalona and L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, where the Socialist party has ruled locally for many years. It involves a discourse and content analysis of television broadcasts during the three months leading up to the local elections that took place in May 2011.
Our aim is to establish whether, beyond the phenomenon as such, the construction of a particular type of discourse is enabled by communication management in relation to timings and the design of agendas and claims. We also aim to describe which strategies and active agents may have resulted in immigration becoming a central issue in the electoral campaign in Badalona whereas not in L’Hospitalet, taking also into account the fact that the elections precipitated a change in government in the first municipality which did not affect the latter. The final objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of the politicized immigration discourse in agenda setting processes, and also to provide a brief description of those mechanisms that reproduce what Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has called elite racism.