The Immigration Issue and the vox Populi: Letters to the Editor in six Scandinavian Newspapers 1970–2016

Abstract

Letters to the editor are argued to be a staple of the public sphere and, by providing regular citizens with a platform to voice their concerns to a large audience, a central democratic function of a liberal press. However, the actual weight given by the press to citizens’ deliberation on issues and the contribution of these letters in terms of content is still little researched, and historical and comparative studies are largely absent. In this article we offer a case study of letters on the immigration issue in six Scandinavian newspapers (N = 1065). Charting their volume and content using content analysis and comparing them to the more elite-dominated columns and regular news items (N = 3264), we identify major historical and national variations in the salience of the issue and the weight given the vox populi in the press. Constructing a discursive space of immigration letters using multiple correspondence analysis and subsequent clustering into seven categories of letters, we identify a historical movement towards more problematizing and cultural discourse, strongest in the Danish newspapers. We also identify Sweden as a particularly interesting case, with fewer letters and less difference between letters and other newspaper content, for which we suggest some hypotheses.