ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at electoral debates on migration across the three cities: Prato, Milan and Rome and six election campaigns. It discusses the general implications of the empirical evidence by paving the way for the investigation of the electoral strategies of local political actors in migration debates. For local Italian elections the analysis shows the overwhelming predominance of security aspects in immigration politics, although there is variation in dimensional attention and tones of debates across local contexts and over time. In the six campaigns, electoral debates on migration were dominated by law and order, not only because security was used symbolically to respond to public concerns on issues of personal safety, but also because local administrations actually have substantial institutional competences on matters of law and order, and often use these to address immigration politics. The chapter suggests that migration debates are not only fragmented, but also strongly related to the characteristics of local settings, local events and local competition.
