“A stronger Denmark” vs. “to welcome people seeking refuge” An analysis of Danish and Swedish newspapers’ and policy documents’ framing of "the refugee crisis” and border controls

The purpose of this thesis is to understand how Danish and Swedish news media and governments framed “the refugee crisis” in the context of the Swedish implementation of border controls in 2015 and the removal of external border controls in 2017. We operationalize framing theory (Entman 1993) to understand the differences and similarities in the framing of "the refugee crisis” in Denmark and Sweden. While the main focus is media representations, policy documents are included in the study to deepen the analysis and understand the similarities and differences across migration policies. Through a quantitative content analysis of 259 newspaper articles from eight Danish and Swedish newspapers, a framing analysis of ten policy documents and a qualitative framing analysis of the overall frames in the news articles and policy documents, we identified a dialectic relation of power between media and political discourse in both countries. We found that issues defined and represented in policy documents tend to reflect the challenges that news media define and the other way around. Even though Danish and Swedish newspapers and policy documents highlight similar problems, our data indicates clear differences in migration policies, in the two countries, in terms of the framing of asylum seekers, refugees and political events in 2015