Who is responsible for migrant integration? Contextual political drivers of governance actors’ responsibility frames in small and medium European localities

This article develops a comparative analysis of ‘responsibility frames’ of migrant integration – i.e. cognitive understandings about who should be responsible for migrant integration – held by actors involved in local integration governance across 36, rigorously selected, European small and medium towns and applies multilevel regression analysis to examine potential contextual and political drivers of the emergence of such frames. Our findings contribute to the existing literature on local integration frames indicating that, first, overall, frames that see integration as a responsibility of ‘migrants only’ prevail over other frames. Second, integration frames are localised, meaning that municipalities provide distinct contexts for the social construction of migrant integration. Third, political factors are crucial at both the individual and contextual level: not only elected local policymakers’ frames depend on their political party affiliation but also frames held by bureaucrats and non-public actors depend on the political affiliation of the local executive of their locality.