Is the press presenting (neoliberal) foreign residency laws in a depoliticised way? The case of investment visas and the reconfiguring of citizenship

Abstract

Neoliberalism calls upon the social sciences to explore how legal innovations – new laws and policies – incorporating neoliberal values are presented to the citizenry. An example are investment visas, a new legal instrument regulating foreign residency. Investment visas reconfigure citizenship by prioritising neoliberal values, by privileging economic capital over labour and over place-and-community involvement in the host country. They also create sub-groups within a same migrant community. The press can present these changes by highlighting how they involve choices among competing values, stimulating debate, or it can hide such choices, offering a depoliticised coverage of the issue. This paper explores how investment visas were presented to the Portuguese public by the press, in connection with the Chinese, its main beneficiary community. The analysis is two-fold: first, a thematic analysis focuses on the representation of the Chinese in two newspapers (n = 525 articles), exploring whether it differentiates the investment visa sub-group within the Chinese community; second, a content analysis examines whether the law’s transformations to citizenship are presented in a depoliticised way (n = 164 articles). Findings indicate that the press shows Chinese investment visa beneficiaries as disconnected from other representations of the Chinese. Additionally, the investment visa laws are presented in a depoliticised way: one (uncontested) perspective is privileged, emphasizing their benefits. Conflicting values are almost absent, and the deterritorialised aspect of citizenship is left unproblematized. We conclude by discussing the implications of this type of coverage in shaping social debate and for the socio-psychological study of legal innovations and of citizenship.

Lisbon's unsustainable tourism intensification: contributions from social representations to understanding a depoliticised press discourse and its consequences

“…This is done by promoting cities as competing actors (brands) whose value depends on their ability to attract international investment, tourists, and new residents in a highly connected and competitive scenario, enhancing a marketing-based approach to urban development and providing new city meanings aimed at the creation of attractive urban narratives (Vives Miró, 2011). It is worth noting that these processes often result in an increasing professionalisation of the management of urban space, which tends to transfer visibility from the "political" to the technical sphere (Mansilla and Milano, 2019), hiding the values and representations of the "common good" that underlie political instruments and choices (Santos et al, 2020). Thus, decision-makers often sustain tourism as a natural and inevitable element of our cities and our times, rather than presenting it as supported by political options based on prioritising values such as unlimited economic (and consumption) growth (Mendes, 2018;Russo and Scarnato, 2018).…”

“…The press, presenting social and legal innovations to the public, has a central role in the process of meaning construction (Castro et al, 2012). The way it frames such innovations can contribute to either promoting the changes they imply or fueling resistance to them (Carvalho, 2008;Elcheroth et al, 2011;Santos et al, 2020). Understanding change and resistance in society thus involve considering the press's role in constructing and perpetuating consensual meaning systems, or hegemonic representations (Moscovici, 1988).…”

“…The reproduction of dominant views also exemplifies how, as some scholars defend (Harvey, 2005;Wacquant, 2012), neoliberalism is now hegemonic in communication, incorporated into the shared common-sense with which "many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world" (Harvey, 2005, p.3) -and thus highly resistant to reflexive questioning. This view of neoliberalism as a system in which the state, through new public policies and laws, is capable of changing meaning-making and shared representations, contributing to aligning them with market views and values (Wacquant, 2012), challenges social and political psychologyto develop ways of better understanding the discursive strategies and meaningmaking processes involved in accepting and resisting the changes -e.g., in laws, meaningcategories and practices -supporting the neoliberal project (Di Masso, Dixon, & Pol, 2011;Santos, Castro, & Guerra, 2020). However, little is yet known about the "discursive formations of neoliberalism, its contestations and alternatives" (Mosedale, 2016, p.19), specifically regarding (un)sustainable tourism and the role of the press in these formations (Pasquinelli and Trunfio, 2020).…”

“…The mediating role of the press contributes to the construction of shared meaning categories at the level of the nation (Moscovici, 1988), helping define whose voices, claims and concerns are considered legitimate and authoritative enough to enter the public debate (Castro, Seixas, Neca, & Bettencourt, 2018;Di Masso et al, 2011;Moscardo, 2011). Combining this approach with the (de)politicisation literature (Maeseele, 2015), the present proposal assumes that press coverages have the power of helping hide political options and conflicts, legitimising certain voices, helping render certain values hegemonic and others invisible (Santos et al, 2020). It also assumes that it is also in their power to, instead, make political options and the existence of alternative views visible, offering a more complex vision of reality, favouring a more reflexive public debate, and encouraging citizens' political engagement (Carvalho, Van Wessel, & Maeseele, 2017;Castro et al, 2018).…”

Learning Processes and Agency in the Decarbonization Context: A Systematic Review through a Cultural Psychology Point of View

“…Beverige and Nauman [90] define the dynamics between depoliticization and politicization as "the movements of issues between an arena of fate and necessity (the non-political), where nothing can be done (depoliticization), to one of deliberation and contingency (the political), where action and change are possible (politicization)" (p. 278). A growing corpus of literature operationalizes depoliticization from a psychosocial view [91], in an environmental context [90,[92][93][94], and in the learning process [95,96]. In a similar scope but from a different theoretical framework, Smerecnik and Renegar [97] provide one example of the functional use of agency by a specific rhetorical marketing strategy in an environmental context.…”