Social Research and ‘Race’ Policy Framing in Britain and France

Frame Origins

Socialisation through formative experiences and discourse had a tremendous impact on the way race frames were moulded and forged in both Britain and France. Lived experiences—either individual or shared with a cohort—can form the building blocks of an actor's frames. This appears to be particularly true if the experiences constitute ‘formative moments’ of youth. Discourses such as those that dominate the political culture or those that are prominent in schools and in conversations with family, friends and colleagues also serve to convey frame elements. They help actors work out their beliefs through interactions with others (Wildavsky 1987; Finnemore 1996). ²

Lived experiences and discourses are central sources of early race frames in Britain and France. Formative personal experiences played a particularly visible role in accounting for British policy experts’ attentions to colour-based discrimination and their frequent use of North America as a policy exemplar in this domain. Many of the original group of the Society of Labour Lawyers who were influential in introducing these themes in the 1965 and 1968 rounds of race relations legislation had studied at Harvard Law School, gaining exposure to the American race and legal context. Moreover, a key proponent and advocate of anti-discrimination legislation throughout all three Race Relations Acts (Anthony Lester) had served as a civil rights observer in the American south in the early 1960s (Lester 1996). These personal experiences helped reinforce the connections between Britain and North America and led to visits by actors who subsequently penned influential reports about the value of North American lessons to British race concerns (Jowell 1965; Street et al. 1967). In addition, the prevailing discourse in 1960s and 1970s Britain encouraged high-level politicians such as Home Secretary Roy Jenkins to travel overseas and to attend to developments in US and Canadian race policies.

If the personal experiences of policy experts were critical catalysts for the development of British race frames, these factors cannot necessarily account for broader acceptance of frame elements among politicians, the media and the public. Long-standing contacts with the United States also helped pave the way to 1960s British race frames. The Edinburgh School of anthropology produced seminal studies of blacks in Britain and helped to shape post-war conceptions of the issues at stake. These authors were influenced by the development of ‘race relations’ as an object of study in the 1920s by Robert Park and the Chicago School of sociology (Rich 1986, 170). ³ Research by Nicholas Deakin (1965), Sheila Patterson (1965) and John Rex and Robert Moore (1967) and the landmark work by E. J. B. Rose (1969) continued in the vein of focusing on skin colour as a determinant of social conflict in the 1960s. Social research thus contributed directly to the formulation of eventual dominant frames in Britain, but it was one of a number of influences rather than constituting an overwhelming element.

Two of the most prominent examples of the impact of research on the trajectory of policy-making came through reports issued by attorneys with a particular interest in learning from the North American situation. ⁴ In early 1964, a group of Labour party lawyers sent an emissary to study the ways in which US states and Canadian provinces had set up their own race relations institutions. Jeffrey Jowell returned to Britain arguing that the weight of evidence from North America implied that administrative conciliation backed by the civil law—rather than criminal sanctions—was the optimal institutional structure for coping with problems of discrimination (Jowell 1965; Lester and Bindman 1972). This preferred policy solution was eventually integrated into the 1965 Race Relations Act and a focus on civil law procedures has endured ever since.

In the run-up to the 1968 Race Relations Act, perhaps the most influential instance of learning from across the Atlantic came in the form of the October 1967 Street Report on anti-discrimination legislation. ⁵ The Report was noteworthy in part for its extensive review of anti-discrimination structures around the world, and for the weight it granted to US and Canadian laws within this review (Street et al. 1967). Its conclusions were in keeping with those of other specialists, namely that North American lessons demonstrated that ‘the law is an acceptable and appropriate instrument for handling the problem’ (Street et al. 1967, 62).

The Street Report helped to legitimise domestic initiatives in late 1967, but the April 1967 Political and Economic Planning (PEP) report on discrimination conclusively demonstrated that discrimination was based primarily on colour (Political and Economic Planning 1967). The outcome impressed even members of the Conservative opposition, including the shadow home secretary. ⁶ While it did not sway everyone's opinion about the need for a new law, it is widely credited with having had a major impact on the process in advance of the July 1967 government announcement of plans to legislate what eventually became the 1968 Race Relations Act (Heineman 1972; Pinder 1981).

As significant as these reports were for helping to shape a consensus around particular policy solutions (in 1965) or illustrating the feasibility and necessity of legislating against a broader range of racial discrimination (in 1967), they cannot fully explain the shift to more widespread public acceptance of colour as a central dimension of British race frames. This shift occurred over time beginning with the politicisation of immigrant tensions in a racialised manner in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, as reflected in media interpretations of salient events, restrictive immigration policies and the instrumental use of race for political gain by Conservative politicians such as Peter Griffiths and Enoch Powell. Social research therefore can be seen as contributing to overall frames and to policy-making itself, but not as determining or redirecting outcomes.

If colour-based discrimination and extensive use of the North American analogy were at the heart of British frames, French frames focused much more centrally on issues of anti-Semitic speech and utterly rejected parallels with the North American situation. The groups that were the principal carriers of the anti-racism project were human rights organisations, such as the Human Rights League, the LICA and the MRAP, founded, respectively, during the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, in the 1920s in response to anti-Semitic east European pogroms and during the Vichy regime of the 1940s. Members of these associations—and especially members of the MRAP—were therefore particularly sensitised to Vichy-type racism.

Although the state repeatedly denied that anti-Semitism was resurgent in the 1950s and 1960s, members of the MRAP and other groups compiled a catalogue of racism during these years. At the top of their list were anti-Semitic acts that recalled the 1930s and 1940s, the fall of the Third Republic and the rise of the Vichy regime. Several MRAP members were in the Resistance (some were Jewish) and had survived deportation to Nazi camps. They were therefore indelibly marked by their war experiences and adhered to their anti-racist project even when it was an issue of low salience for the rest of the nation. When the political class passed anti-racism legislation in 1972, it adopted the long-standing MRAP-inspired proposals originally influenced by a definition of the problems of racism that focused primarily on anti-Semitism. ⁷

The widespread emphasis that was placed on formal equality before the law also strongly affected French race frames. Although several factors served to reinforce the formal-egalitarian model in France, perhaps the most visible and most influential have been those embedded in aspects of French political culture. ⁸ Race-based group equality policies were not legitimate in France in the post-war era because they immediately and consistently evoked cultural themes that condemned them as inappropriate. France's emphasis on equality before the law depends to a large extent on a shared discourse about the lessons of the Revolution and of Vichy. Until recently, most French citizens interpreted the Republican tradition as being incompatible with groups such as races or ethnicities making identitarian claims on the state. Moreover, because ethnic marking was used for the nefarious purpose of isolating and deporting Jews during the Second World War, categorising individuals in this way is deemed a dubious practice by many in France. Historical memories therefore helped to create an especially strong stigma against unequal treatment by race or ethnicity.

Long-standing scepticism about the potential for the United States to serve as a positive model tilted the balance even further away from the possibility of recognising race and ethnicity. In the waning decades of the 20th century, strategies for organising ethnic pluralism, immigration and integration were a common target among influential intellectuals who served to reinforce the long-standing scepticism about the ‘modèle Anglo-Saxon’. ⁹ As Eric Fassin (1999, 226) has written about a much-cited 1989 article by Régis Debray, ‘when discussing the politics of multiculturalism, “America” is the Other—a radically different culture of cultural difference’. The origins and initial continuity of French race frames and race policies thus owe little to social research, except inasmuch as leading thinkers helped to shore up the general political culture that underpinned specific frames about how to conceive of race and racism through the mid-1990s.

Frame Change

Unlike ‘national traditions’ perspectives or some models of political culture that view ideas as fixed and immutable, framing arguments hold that ideas are subject to change and that they are no less significant because they evolve over time. When analysing frame change as opposed to the origins of frames, informational models of learning are often more appropriate explanatory tools than interpretive models of socialisation. But even here, social research is but one factor that can inject new information into the system, and the impact of new information is likely to depend on its interaction with instrumental, institutional and interpretive forces.

In Britain, for example, there was a significant shift in thinking about race issues among policy-making elites between passage of the 1968 Race Relations Act and passage of the 1976 Race Relations Act. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, British political leaders adhered to a notion that public policy in a multiracial society should be colour-blind. This was in keeping with the predominant understanding of civil rights laws in the mid-1960s across the Atlantic. In debates over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prominent organisations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP supported colour-blindness, and Senator Hubert Humphrey emphasised that ‘Title VII prohibits discrimination. In effect, it says that race, religion, and national origin are not to be used as the basis for hiring and firing. Title VII is designed to encourage hiring on the basis of ability and qualification, not race or religion’ (quoted in Skrentny 1996, 3). Anti-racism legislation on both sides of the Atlantic was therefore originally crafted to punish people who acted on racial prejudice, not to encourage the use of racial categories for egalitarian ends.

However, this adherence to colour-blindness soon changed in the United States. Affirmative action became a major tool in the American race policy repertoire in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Graham 1990), signalling a shift toward policies that reified racial groups and that reflected a concern with representation or utilisation of minorities (Skrentny 1996, 7–8). The cornerstone Supreme Court decision that legitimised this transition was rendered in the 1971 case of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., ¹⁰ when the Court recognised that seemingly neutral job requirements could provide ‘built-in headwinds’ that would disparately impact minorities applying for jobs (Skrentny 1996, 166–171; Graham 1990, 383–391). The decision made it unlawful for employers to establish qualifications that had the effect of lowering minorities’ job prospects, regardless of whether the qualifications were intended to do so. The sum total of these bureaucratic and judicial decisions of the late 1960s and early 1970s amounted to a significant shift toward race-consciousness in US policy.

During these years, anti-discrimination institutions were not altered in Britain. With the return of the Labour party to power in 1974, however, inter-group relations moved back on to the legislative agenda. The government passed the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 and a new Race Relations Act in 1976. This was to be the last overhaul of anti-racism institutions in the 20th century, and it was substantial. ¹¹ For the first time, the 1976 Act included race-conscious provisions, such as permission for employers and others to engage in positive action (soft affirmative action in American parlance) and restrictions on indirect discrimination (the equivalent to disparate impact discrimination banned in the US through the Griggs decision). Britain did not copy all aspects of American institutions. Nor did its anti-discrimination institutions become as race-conscious as North American ones. Nevertheless, the transition from colour-blindness to a measure of race-consciousness marked a significant shift in Britain that needs to be explained.

When Labour party leaders decided to revisit the topic of discrimination in the mid-1970s, they focused first on the issue of gender before turning to the topic of race (Sooben 1990). At no time in the early stages of planned anti-discrimination legislation were indirect discrimination or positive action on the agenda. This was true even as late as September 1974, when the government published its White Paper Equality for Women. Neither this document nor the public comments that followed noticed the absence of either policy element (UK Home Office 1974; Lester 1994, 227). However, before proceeding with either law, British experts looked to North America. Members of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration went to the United States (and to the Netherlands) in 1975 to gather information for their report on the organisation of the race relations administration (UK Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration 1975, 267). And before finalising plans for anti-discrimination legislation in late 1974, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins and his principal policy adviser Anthony Lester visited the US and met with American experts who pointed out the potential usefulness of race-conscious policies (Lester 1994, 227).

One of the lessons learned from North American developments was that confining the definition of discrimination to direct intentional acts was insufficient. The Griggs decision was singled out as having a particular impact on British experts’ thinking. Anthony Lester stated that it was the ‘original intellectual inspiration’ for Britain's provisions against indirect discrimination (Lester 1987, 23, fn. 7). The second lesson consisted of a more positive attitude toward policies that assist disadvantaged groups such as women and racial minorities. Following his trip to North America in 1974, Home Secretary Jenkins admitted that targeting policies for the benefit of some groups may be justified, stating in the House of Commons that ‘we should not be so blindly loyal to the principle of formal legal equality as to ignore the actual and practical inequalities between the sexes, still less to prohibit positive action to help men and women to compete on genuinely equal terms and to overcome an undesirable historical link’ (Hansard, 26 March 1975, vol. 889, col. 514). In response to information gleaned from North American experiences, the government revised its proposals to include both indirect discrimination and positive action clauses in the Sex Discrimination Bill of 1975 and carried these over into the Race Relations Bill of 1976. Although British experts did not propose using the quotas, set-asides or race-norming sometimes associated with affirmative action in the United States, they no longer dismissed race-conscious policies as dangerous or superfluous (Lester 1987, 23).

In this case, learning—in keeping with the insights of the informational school of thought on frame change—played a central role. But social research was not the most important vector of discovering new information. In the mid-1970s, the influential research organisation Political and Economic Planning (whose 1967 report had generated substantial pressure for the 1968 Race Relations Act) produced another set of reports on race relations (Smith 1974 and 1976; Smith and Whalley 1975), but policy-makers made virtually no mention of them in discussions preceding the 1976 Race Relations Act. It was not internal British research, scholarship or public debate that turned the tide in favour of colour-consciousness; rather, it was lesson-drawing (Rose 1991) from other jurisdictions that had more experience with a policy area. The home secretary, his advisers and his parliamentary and bureaucratic colleagues studied closely the policies implemented in North America, and shifted their opinions about colour-blindness as a result.

On the whole, ‘race’ policies in the sense used in this essay were relatively stable through the 1990s. Since the latter part of that decade, however, there have been three developments in British race policies that are worth noting. First, primarily because of national and global events (namely the Rushdie affair and the rise of terrorism associated with Islam), British public opinion and laws have increasingly incorporated Muslims into the previously colour-centric race institutions. ¹² Second, institutional racism has become a national watchword in Britain in response to the Macpherson Report on the death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence and the failure of the police to build a case against the perpetrators (Macpherson of Cluny 1999). Finally, in the broader context of integration policy, there has been a modest turn away from the standard multicultural rhetoric of Britain as a ‘community of citizens and a community of communities’ (The Runnymede Trust 2000), and a revival of a more assimilationist approach to integrating immigrants and minorities that echoes themes traditionally more prominent in France (Joppke 2004). Treating each of these fluctuations in British policies in depth is not possible in this essay, but it is important to note that just as in the origins and shift in frames and policies discussed in depth above, social research made an impact in some of these developments, but did not determine the outcome in any of these additional cases.

Since the late 1990s, France has also been on the move in its framing and policy-making with respect to race. Prior to that time, the rhetoric of Republican citizenship was so firmly entrenched that discussions of discrimination, race, ethnic monitoring, affirmative action and minority representation were all but dismissed in the French public sphere. By the late 1990s, however, the tide was already beginning to turn. ¹³ A flurry of official activity began at that time, resulting in an alphabet soup of bureaucratic productivity. In 1996 the Conseil d’État's report entitled Reflections on Equality raised the issue of discrimination as a key challenge for the French model of integration and suggested that new ideas were needed in this domain. In 1998, the Haut Conseil à l'Intégration (HCI) published a report on discrimination. This was followed by the formation of the Groupe d’Études sur les Discriminations (GED), subsequently transformed into the more active-sounding Groupe d’Études et de Lutte contre les Discriminations (GELD) which oversaw a national hotline for reporting discrimination. The Ministry of the Interior launched the Commissions d'Accès à la Citoyenneté (CODAC) which undertook actions against discrimination at the departmental level and were later superseded by the Commissions pour la Promotion de l’Égalité des Chances et la Citoyenneté (COPEC). In a similar vein, the decades-old Fonds d'Action Sociale (FAS) was renamed the Fonds d'Action et de Soutien pour l'Intégration et la Lutte contre les Discriminations (FASILD), which subsequently was phased out in favour of the Agence Nationale pour la Cohésion Sociale et l’Égalité des Chances (Acsé). For good measure the state also created the Haute Autorité de Lutte contre les Discriminations et pour l’Égalité (HALDE). Within the space of the eight years between 1998 and 2006, racial discrimination went from backstage to centre stage in French official discourse and actions, with racist and anti-Semitic speech correspondingly losing relative policy-making priority.

Although with less dramatic results, there have also been new frontiers opened in the areas of minority representation, affirmative action and ethnic monitoring. Prior to the turn of the 21st century, the state limited its interactions in this policy domain to those with associations organised around themes of immigrant integration or with long-standing representatives of established religious groups. Over the past few years, however, there have been growing numbers of officially recognised or civil society groups organised at least partially around an ethnic, racial or religious identity that have chipped away at the Republican myth and revealed more naked political dynamics. The most widely known of these representative bodies is undoubtedly the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (CFCM), launched by the state in 2003 after several abortive attempts at similar organisations in the 1990s. However, there is also a host of budding local groups that are forming along parallel lines, some of which have even amalgamated themselves into the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires de France (CRAN), the motto of which is ‘se rassembler pour mieux compter’. It is hard to imagine an association more at odds with the common vision of France's relationship to race and representation.

Alongside the attention to discrimination and the formation of minority representative bodies have come new debates about the usefulness (or appropriateness) of affirmative action. ¹⁴ During his tenure as interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy helped launch a national debate about discrimination positive when he indicated that he would be favourable to it and, further, advocated appointing a ‘Muslim prefect’. He came in for much criticism for these positions, and ultimately edged away from this rhetoric when running for president. As some scholars have noted, de facto positive discrimination already exists in France for geographic areas with high concentrations of ethnic minorities (Calvès 2000). Yet the ethnic dimension of such policies has only recently been fully and openly debated with, for example, the creation of special recruiting policies by the Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po) which subsequently have been echoed by other grandes écoles in France as well as by employers actively seeking to diversify their labour forces (Sabbagh 2002). ¹⁵ There have even been calls for France to mimic California and Texas programmes by granting admission to selective institutions of higher education to the top few per cent of graduates from every secondary school, regardless of the educational level or demographic background of the district (Weil 2005, 94–98). While both the Sciences Po initiative and the ‘percentage’ programmes are race neutral and geographically based, their explicit goal is to take radical steps to promote equality across racial and ethnic boundaries.

France has also flirted with ethnic monitoring, even though counting and categorising people by race or ethnicity remains a very touchy subject. ¹⁶ The National Assembly wove a provision into a 2007 immigration bill that would have permitted collection of such data in the service of studies designed to ‘measure the diversity of persons’ origins, discrimination, and integration’. ¹⁷ While it justified this move based on the scientific recommendations of a CNIL ¹⁸ study group, the same group—as well as the HALDE—has proven reluctant to accede to pressures by some researchers, international bodies and lobby groups like the CRAN to implement a more systematic national scheme for identifying racial and ethnic minorities (Simon 2007, 49–52). In the end, the Constitutional Council struck down the parliamentary provision on technical grounds, but it also gratuitously indicated its hostility to the principle behind it. ¹⁹

Thus, the emerging picture remains complex and in some ways contradictory. France has turned its attention to discrimination and disadvantage, and has increasingly recognised that race and ethnicity are important markers in these debates. But most leading actors are unwilling to supply the country with the tools that civil rights advocates in most anglophone countries (and to a lesser extent, the Netherlands) agree are exceptionally helpful in the fight against certain kinds of systematic inequalities. Race frames and anti-racism policies are in motion in France, but are best classified as shifting, rather than as having definitively shifted. ²⁰

What explains these changes? Social research and research reports by public bodies played a role in paving the way for these new policies. Throughout the early to mid-1990s, a few scholars swam against the stream by discussing issues of discrimination and colour-based racism (Costa-Lascoux 1990; Taguieff 1991a and 1991b; Wieviorka 1991; Wihtol de Wenden 1995; Vourc'h et al. 1996). For the most part, however, they did so in relative isolation and without a major public, political or even scholarly following, given the dominance of ‘Republican’ discourses about citizenship and immigrant integration coupled with specific concerns about the Front National and its effect on racism in France. ²¹

The 1996 Conseil d’État report on equality, the publication of Philippe Bataille's (1997) Le Racisme au Travail and the 1998 HCI report on discrimination are credited with helping to turn public and political attention toward a new discrimination-based frame that reconceptualised—at least in part—much of the old integration-based thinking and politics (Lorcerie 2000; Fassin 2002). This signalled a powerful push to define the major problems in French society in new ways, and launched the current era of frame contestation that has opened up contemporary policy-making to new outcomes as outlined above. But social research was not sufficient to reframe debates. It acted in conjunction with other factors that helped ensure the beginning stages of the complex re-framing that has been taking place in France for the last decade. The years 1997 to 2000 saw the confluence of a number of instrumental, institutional and interpretive factors that served to facilitate the transition. The surprise election of the left in 1997 put the Socialist government in the position of searching for new and popular policy directions at the same time as the far right Front National was being pulled apart due to internal dissent in 1998 (Lorcerie 2000). These factors created an opening for anti-racist activists and politicians to turn their attention away from a more standard focus on anti-Semitic speech and themes of immigrant integration and help to account for the October 1998 commitment by the Minister for Employment and Solidarity to make the fight against racial discrimination in employment a political priority (Lorcerie 2000, 74–75; Fassin 2002, 408). ²²

Once the political leadership was engaged, there was an interaction between socialisation, institutionalisation and new information through reports that moved the process along. The Jospin government's internal discussions and subsequent creation and transformation of a plethora of domestic institutions such as the CODAC, COPEC, GED, GELD, FASILD, Acsé, HALDE and others provided a domestic institutional base supporting the new framing of French problems in discrimination terms, and opening up discussion of issues of racial disadvantage, and of the potential for race-based solutions such as ethnic monitoring and ‘positive discrimination’. Representatives of these organisations help keep these issues in play and produce periodic reports on discrimination and of the value—or dangers—of moving toward a new frame and toward new policies.

Internationally, French representatives have also been engaged in more discussions with their foreign counterparts, primarily through the European Union. In the wake of the 1999 Austrian elections that catapulted the far right Freedom party into a coalition government in early 2000, the EU was searching for a relevant policy response that would condemn any possible move toward extremist politics (Geddes and Guiraudon 2004). The EU quickly passed its 2000 Race Directive (2000/43/CE), which called in part for implementation of a variety of anti-discrimination provisions in the domestic law of its member states, including passage of provisions against indirect discrimination—often seen as more race-conscious provisions than those against direct discrimination (Bleich 2003)—and the establishment of a national institution to lead the fight against racism. While these multiple forces have contributed to the new frames that are emerging in France, by themselves they were not enough to ensure a full transition; most actors in France have not signed on to the full slate of elements of the British frames, nor do they agree upon which policy changes are possible or desirable within the French system.

Conclusions

In the cases reviewed in this essay, social research was not overwhelmingly important in transforming policy frames or in shaping policy outcomes. Given the amount of research generated every year, it should not be surprising that most of this work has little impact on the course of history. Yet social research did play a role in race policy development in each country. Therefore, while it is important to put its influence in perspective, it is also worth the effort to reflect on the pathways through which social research affects framing and policy-making, as well as the conditions under which it is likely to matter most. In what ways did social research matter in the cases reviewed here? And what implications does this evidence have for broader theorising about the research–policy nexus in European migration and integration and in other policy domains?

General research on race relations in Britain helped reinforce the predominant understanding of the problems of racism faced by society in the early post-war era. It therefore became a means of socialisation in the sense suggested by interpretivists. Specific research projects such as Jeffrey Jowell's 1964 paper, the 1967 Street Report and the 1967 PEP report on discrimination also interjected concrete evidence about the extent of discrimination in society and about the potential for the law to remedy this problem. In doing so, such research generated learning in ways highlighted by the informational school of thought. These interventions played a significant role in pushing legislation further along in the agenda-setting process. In the later stages of British race policy-making, social research has played a much smaller role. Many of the new ideas to enter the British debate since the mid-1970s have come either from abroad (the American experience) or have been spurred by world events (attention to Muslims) or by governmental reports (the introduction of the concept of institutional racism in the Macpherson Report). This does not mean that social research cannot play a significant role in contemporary British race policy-making, only that its recent influence has not been as great as in earlier eras.

In France, the pattern has been reversed. There was very little effect of social research on early frames or policy development. Very few pieces of independent research existed in the years leading up to the passage of the 1972 landmark law against racism, and actors involved in the process relied more on their own experiences in determining the best path for policy-making. Conversely, social research played a significant role in generating new attention to issues of discrimination from the mid-1990s onward. It has done so, however, in conjunction with a propitious political environment (the left in power and the temporary faltering of the far right) and new institutional structures that have helped embed the shifting race frame and that have increased pressure for additional policies.

In light of this summary of the specific cases, what can be said more generally about the role of social research in affecting policy frames and policy-making? At the broadest level, it is useful to view social research as fitting most easily into an informational perspective on framing. Research can establish new facts, make existing facts more concrete and persuasive to sceptical audiences or make more plausible certain policy proposals. Research can also serve a role in the socialisation process if it generates or reinforces popular perceptions of how the world works and of critical policy challenges and solutions.

Moreover, there appear to be certain circumstances that enhance the probability of social research having a significant impact. The prevailing uncertainty in the early British case, for example, offered an opportunity for research to shape budding policy frames. When a policy domain is new or when it generates significant uncertainty (especially in the absence of entrenched interests), social research can play an especially important role in funnelling identities and frames of understanding. Research is also likely to have a greater impact when it dovetails with prevailing interests of powerful actors and when its findings or implications become institutionalised, as recent developments in France demonstrate. In sum, social research will seldom be the most important influence on policy frames or policy outcomes, but its timing, its fit with the interests of powerful actors and the ways in which it becomes institutionalised in the national political scene can increase the odds of its affecting policy trajectories and can enhance its potential for resolving the thorny dilemmas that have so often accompanied debates about migration and integration in contemporary Europe.