Populism and Securitization: The Corrosion of Elite Security Authority in a US–Mexico Border State

Abstract

Populists have often seemed influential in the securitization of migration, in great part through pressuring non-populist governing elites into “mainstreaming” more hardline immigration positions. This article asks why, given the presumption in securitization literatures that elite insiders possess strong authority in defining security, non-populist governing elites often in fact cede ground to populist challengers who paint immigration as a threat. Securitization and political science literatures paint very different pictures of elite–challenger dynamics, but populist and securitization claims possess key ideational similarities, in relation to the holism and autonomy of the political community, and the apoliticism of pursuing purportedly self-evident goals. However, populism articulates securitarian concepts through a moralized anti-elitism that impugns elite authority, portraying governing elites as corruptly inert toward threats facing “the people.” This article explores how this ideational relationship may affect securitization processes through a process-tracing study of the populist radical right's successful pressuring of governing elites to securitize migration in the US state of Arizona. There, populists’ moralized accusations of corrupt elite inaction toward urgent security threats moved governing elites to adopt positions intended to demonstrate responsiveness to public border-security anxieties, thereby inscribing securitization. Taking an “ideational” view of both concepts shows how they can form a politically influential account of “common sense.” By undermining elite security authority—thus inverting the typically theorized power dynamics of securitization—populism may open new pathways for securitized policies to emerge.

Extrait

Les populistes ont souvent semblé avoir une influence sur la sécuritisation de la migration, en grande partie de par la pression qu'ils exercent sur les élites dirigeantes non-populistes pour qu'elles « démarginalisent » les positions plus radicales sur l'immigration. Cet article s'interroge sur les raisons pour lesquelles, malgré le fait que les différentes littératures sur la sécuritisation présument que les élites en place détiennent une forte autorité dans la définition de la sécurité, ces élites dirigeantes non-populistes cèdent en réalité souvent du terrain face à leurs opposants populistes qui dépeignent l'immigration comme une menace. Les littératures sur la sécuritisation et les sciences politiques brossent des portraits très différents des dynamiques entre élites et opposants, mais les revendications populistes et de sécuritisation ont des similarités idéationnelles clés en lien avec le holisme et l'autonomie de la communauté politique et avec l'apolitisme de la poursuite d'objectifs qui vont prétendument de soi. Cependant, le populisme articule différents concepts sécuritaires en passant par un anti-élitisme moralisé qui conteste l'autorité des élites dirigeantes en les présentant comme étant inertes face aux menaces auxquelles « le peuple » est confronté de par leur corruption. Cet article explore la manière dont cette relation idéationnelle peut affecter les processus de sécuritisation en s'appuyant sur une étude retraçant le processus par lequel la droite radicale populiste a réussi à faire pression sur les élites dirigeantes pour qu'elles sécuritisent la migration dans l’État américain d'Arizona. Dans cet État, les populistes ont émis des accusations moralisées de corruption et d'inaction des élites dirigeantes face aux menaces urgentes pour la sécurité, et ces accusations ont poussé ces dernières à adopter des positions ayant pour but de démontrer leur réactivité aux inquiétudes publiques quant à la sécurité frontalière, s'inscrivant ainsi dans la sécuritisation. L'adoption d'un point de vue « idéationnel » sur les deux concepts montre la façon dont ils peuvent constituer un compte rendu politiquement influent du « bon sens ». En sapant l'autorité des élites en matière de sécurité—et en inversant ainsi les dynamiques de pouvoir généralement théorisées dans le domaine de la sécurisation—le populisme peut ouvrir de nouvelles voies pour l’émergence de politiques sécuritisées.

Resumen

Los populistas a menudo han parecido influyentes en la securitización de la migración, en gran parte, a través de la presión a las élites gobernantes no populistas para “integrar” posturas más firmes con respecto a la inmigración. Este artículo se pregunta por qué, dada la suposición en las publicaciones de securitización de que los miembros elitistas poseen una fuerte autoridad para definir la seguridad, las élites gobernantes no populistas a menudo ceden terreno a los oponentes populistas que describen la inmigración como una amenaza. Las publicaciones de securitización y ciencias políticas muestran panoramas muy distintos de la dinámica de los oponentes elitistas, pero las afirmaciones populistas y de la securitización presentan similitudes ideales clave, en relación con el holismo y la autonomía de la comunidad política, además del apoliticismo de seguir metas supuestamente obvias. No obstante, el populismo expresa conceptos de la securitización a través de un antielitismo moralizado que cuestiona a la autoridad elitista y representa a las élites gobernantes como corruptamente inertes respecto a las amenazas que enfrentan “al pueblo.” Este artículo analiza cómo esta relación ideal puede afectar a los procesos de securitización a través de un estudio de rastreo de proceso de la presión exitosa de la derecha radical populista (populist radical right, PRR) a las élites gobernantes para securitizar la migración en el estado de Arizona de los EE. UU. Allí, las acusaciones moralizadas de los populistas de la inactividad corrupta de la élite frente a las amenazas de seguridad urgentes produjeron que las élites gobernantes adoptaran posturas destinadas a demostrar la capacidad de respuesta ante las ansiedades públicas relacionadas con la seguridad en la frontera y, de esa manera, se implementó la securitización. Adoptar una postura “ideal” de ambos conceptos muestra de qué manera pueden formar una explicación políticamente influyente del “sentido común.” Al desautorizar a la autoridad de seguridad elitista, y así invertir la dinámica de poder de la securitización que suele teorizarse, el populismo puede abrir nuevos caminos para que surjan políticas securitizadas.

Introduction

The recent increase of public and academic interest in populism has begun to make a discernible impact upon international relations and its subfields. Theoretical contributions have highlighted how populists’ claims about the nation are inseparable from claims about the international (Chryssogelos 2020; Holliday 2020). Substantial work has developed on populism and foreign policy (Boucher and Thies 2019; Plagemann and Destradi 2019; Wojczewski 2020), and on populist movements’ narratives of ontological (in)security (Kinnvall 2019; Steele and Homolar 2019). Yet, a gap has persisted between populism-oriented scholarship and the main lens through which the development and expansion of security agendas have been understood—that of securitization.

In one way, this gap is surprising. One of the key phenomena the securitization literature has examined has been the securitization of migration—that is, the process of “integrating [the] issue into a security framework that emphasises policing and defence” (Bourbeau 2014, 2). In Europe and North America, populists have frequently appeared very influential in this process. A large political science literature has examined how the populist radical right (PRR), across many countries, intently champions hardline policies that treat immigration as a threat. Such anti-immigration campaigning has been identified as the indispensable ingredient for increased PRR electoral success (Ivarsflaten 2008), and where populist-right figures such as Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump have directly controlled immigration policymaking, they have unmistakably pursued securitizing policies. Even when not at the decision-making table, however, the PRR's challenges have often seemed instrumental in influencing non-populist governing elites to advance hardline, security-heavy immigration policies (Norris 2005; van Spanje 2010; Odmalm and Hepburn 2017)—a major way their immigration positions have become “mainstreamed” (Mudde 2019; Mondon and Winter 2020). Migration has been an essential topic in securitization studies, key to general theoretical development (Bigo 2002; Huysmans 2006; Doty 2007; Bourbeau 2011), yet in this literature, the apparent importance of populism to this process has remained strikingly seldom discussed. This leaves the “populism gap” in securitization studies quite conspicuous.

In another way, however, this gap is not surprising. Theorizing populist influence within securitization processes presents a substantial puzzle, because securitization scholarship has lacked ways to grasp how challenges to governing elites over purported security issues can politically succeed. Securitization has been closely associated with the primacy of elite insiders in these processes, while challengers presumptively lack traction in making effective security claims. Growing from the exceptionalist logic of deference to authority when survival is at stake (Wæver 1995; Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998), this image of sovereign decisionism in securitization has been very influential, tending to be echoed even in later criticisms of securitization theory (Neal 2012, 107). Accordingly, securitization literatures have offered few accounts of how governing elites respond to challenges to their authority over purported security issues. Yet, such challenges are central to populist politics, as one of populism's essential characteristics is the confrontation of an allegedly corrupt “elite” on behalf of a pure “people” (Mudde 2004, 543). If securitization consolidates due to the political capital of the elite insiders who instigate it, how could populist challenges over immigration successfully threaten existing political elites, or prompt them to shift their immigration positions? Why would powerful insiders in prime position to “speak security” so often yield—or, indeed, fall—in the face of such a challenge?

This article aims to address this puzzle. To do so, it develops an argument about how populism can advance securitization processes by disrupting the same power dynamics often theoretically presumed to underlie those processes. Populists mobilize a logic that resonates with classical securitarian concepts of community and threat, but which fundamentally impugns the authority of governing elites to define and address the issue. This synthesis of populist and securitization elements can have effects on political competition that push governing elites into defensive strategies that securitize immigration—strategies that appeal to governing elites specifically as a response to moralized populist accusations of corrupt inaction toward threat. In identifying how populism breaks securitization studies’ presumed association between social acceptance of threat and elite empowerment, this account complicates its pervasive image of elite security authority, adding to “sociological” (Balzacq 2015b) explorations of the varied politics of security in domestic-political arenas (Hegemann 2018; Neal 2019).

This article proceeds in two main parts. First, it examines the scholarly literatures on security and populism, to open up investigation of these concepts’ possible relationship. These two bodies of scholarship present contrasting images of “the elite,” its presumed authority, and its dynamic with challengers. While securitization scholarship often sees this authority as cemented through the social recognition of threat, in the populist view, the insecurities said to face the “people” reveal the “elite's” moral corruption. To allow securitization scholarship to take greater account of the indeterminate political consequences of such portrayals, this article identifies how securitization scholars can draw from innovations in populism scholarship that have developed an “ideational” approach to the concept (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017). In examining characteristic ideational elements of the logics of security and right-wing populism, it in turn becomes evident they share essential conceptual connections—including an ostensible apoliticism, a fixation on autonomy, and pretensions of holism. Yet crucially, populism articulates these elements through an inextricable anti-elitism, challenging existing power-holders and their supposedly corrupt values. Understanding whether this has any significant political consequences, however, requires close empirical examination.

Second, therefore, this article engages in a process-tracing case study of the securitization of migration in the US border state of Arizona between 2004 and 2010, analyzing how radical right-wing populists successfully challenged governing elites over the issue, leading them to adopt escalating securitizing approaches toward migration. This case study shows how populist charges of corrupt inaction toward an urgent security threat represented a disruptive, moralized challenge to elite security authority, yielding distinct policy responses. Non-populist elites attempted to demonstrate closeness to ordinary people's security fears to keep control of the immigration issue, while rejecting PRR proposals. Yet, these strategies continually ceded policy ground, inscribing securitization.

Accounting for the presence of populism in such a case shows how, far from presumptively authoritative, governing elites’ ability to define security in context can be quite politically fragile. Populism and securitization logics’ conceptual connections—and their ability to be employed synergistically, with significant consequences for security agendas—hold theoretical, methodological, and normative implications for securitization scholars.

Elites and Challengers in Populism and Securitization Scholarship

Scholars of ontological security have observed how populists often leverage everyday feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and crisis (Kinnvall 2019; Steele and Homolar 2019). However, even if such mobilizations of insecurity from more marginal places are evident, within securitization scholarship, it remains a puzzle how they can become politically effective. The basic issue is that the main premises in the securitization literature for how such hardline security views may dominate issues are rooted in the power of security-speaking elite insiders. As this article will explore, however, it is precisely this kind of elite authority that populists attack. While securitization scholarship has seen extensive criticism of the original Copenhagen School theory (Wæver 1995; Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998), its formulation of sovereign decisionism in the security realm has proven robustly influential, as “critical security scholarship [has] performed the same classic security trope ... that security is an existential realm of sovereign or executive prerogative” (Neal 2012, 107).

Within securitization scholarship, there has been a strong tendency to view the invocation of security as shutting down political contestation, cementing the authority of existing elites (Hagmann, Hegemann, and Neal 2018, 5). While in “normal” political issues, elites are seen as subject to a variety of pressures and may filter emerging issues into the political agenda, security issues are distinguished by the premise of exceptionalism: Security's existential connotations imminently contain the need for swift action and thus sovereign decision, outside “normal” conventions. In this conceptualization, a securitization move's success depends in great part on its initiator's political authority. “[A]lthough this should not be defined as official authority” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 33), effective outsider speakers are difficult to imagine: “Security is articulated only from a specific place, in an institutional voice, by elites” (Wæver 1995, 57). Elites’ power—their recourse to greater (often classified) information, and their superior resources for commanding political attention and mobilization—means they can reshape the definition of security in context to subvert challenges (Wæver 1995, 54).

In this view, elites not only possess formidable advantages in “speaking security” effectively, but in doing so, they accrue further legitimacy and power. In a Schmittian sense, the decisionism of the securitizing actor is co-constituted with the status of the “people” as an entity capable of self-defense (Williams 2003, 518–19). This underlines the moral authority presumed to follow from elites’ successful invocation of threat, binding elite authority to the community's demand for security. Because securitization implies recourse to a domain where their power is difficult to contest, governing elites have often been portrayed as holding vested interests in securitization (Boswell 2008; Karyotis 2011), instigating it to secure legitimacy (Bigo 2002) or to gain greater control over favored issues (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 29). This domineering vision of securitization has been the principal one in the field, troubling scholars with a wide range of theoretical orientations (Wæver 1995; Aradau 2004; Huysmans 2006; Loader and Walker 2007).

Consequently, securitization studies have not developed a focus on how challenges to elite security authority might politically succeed. While sociological securitization scholarship frequently examines the roles of actors other than decision-making executives in securitization processes, it has not really emerged how anyone other than those leading decision-makers can drive securitized policy developments. Challenges to existing elites over security have been conceptualized as pushing in the other direction: as the questioning of elite securitizing moves in official arenas like parliaments (Jarvis and Legrand 2017; Hegemann 2018), or as subaltern resistance to these moves (Blanc 2015; see Vuori 2015, 30). Much less clear is how those outside decisive circles of power might successfully catalyze securitization. While sociological accounts lend greater power to securitization “audiences” (Côté 2016), in a speaker–audience dynamic, existing elites still maintain the initiating “speaker” role, even if their claims undergo thicker social negotiation. Therefore, the implication remains that in defining security, governing elites sit in the driver's seat.

Where scholars have identified elite security accounts being challenged as inadequate, it has remained unclear how these challenges might succeed politically. Doty's studies of border vigilantes active in Arizona during the 2000s decade question insider-elite dominance in “speaking security” (Doty 2007, 2009), noting citizen border patrols’ invocations of “popular sovereignty” in demands “ultimately aimed at the state, which they claim has failed ‘the people’” (Doty 2009, 11). However, later scholarship examining domestic-political settings to interrogate security's purported exceptionalism (e.g., Bourbeau 2011; Hagmann, Hegemann, and Neal 2018; Neal 2019) has not focused on how such challenges may place elite insiders under perceived threat, or alter their decision-making.

Those questions, however, have been a major area of focus for another cluster of scholarship: that on the PRR and immigration politics, two literatures that substantially overlap (e.g., van Spanje 2010; Odmalm and Hepburn 2017; McKeever 2020). Here, a very different perspective on elite–challenger dynamics emerges. This scholarship does not grow from an initial exceptionalist separation of security-inflected politics from “normal” politics. Accordingly, it offers more advanced perspectives than securitization studies about why elite decision-makers might, under pressure, shift their positions in hardline directions. In particular, this perspective considers how the populist articulation of the “elite”—as corrupt, and standing athwart the general will of a righteous “people”—may shape political competition.

Anti-elitism—through the portrayal of a Manichean division between a pure “people” (often synonymous with the genuine nation) and a corrupt elite—is a defining element of populist mobilizations (Mudde 2004, 543). Like in securitization theory, in the populist view, the “elite” does very much include, and refer in part to, the main institutional political power-holders (De Cleen 2016, 73), though both the “elite” and its counterpart concept the “people” possess essential ambiguities that populists may leverage (Brubaker 2020). However, crucially, the populist object of opposition is both an “elite” itself and, more broadly, that elite's supposed values (Canovan 1999, 3). Indeed, the key aspect of populism's people–elite dichotomy is that it is portrayed as a moral distinction—the substance of which is often fleshed out by the “host” ideology (e.g., a right-wing one) of any particular variety of populism (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013, 151).

Of course, increased electoral success can complicate populist politicians’ outsider status. Populists who head governments often maintain people–elite distinctions by campaigning against an elite then identified in bureaucracies or cultural institutions (De Cleen 2017, 350). In this sense, populists’ anti-elitism does not oppose the existence of a political elite per se, but rather it opposes a particular elite identified as corrupt and therefore illegitimate (De Cleen 2017, 345). Where populists hold visible public office but remain outside of government—their most typical position in the past twenty years—they may be characterized as “outsider-elites: connected to the elites, but not part of them” (Mudde 2004, 560, emphasis in the original), in contrast to “insider-elites” who hold the greatest direct influence on governance or policy. For the PPR campaigning against such governing elites, the mobilization of anti-immigration grievances has been identified in past scholarship as the indispensable ingredient for increased electoral success (Ivarsflaten 2008; Oesch 2008; Lucassen and Lubbers 2012). In some countries—such as Italy, Austria, Poland, and the United States—the success of such challenges has led PRR figures to governing power and direct control over migration governance. Where, more typically, the PRR has remained outside of government, its influence has been analyzed in how it affects political positioning by other policy actors (Minkenberg 2001).

The idea that this sort of moralized challenge to governing elites over security could be effective—allowing populist challengers to politically threaten those in power, or pressure them into changing their immigration positions—is scarcely contemplated in the securitization literature. However, political science contributions focusing on populism and migration have seen it as empirically evident that PRR challenges over immigration often do help to prompt hardline, securitarian shifts on the issue by both center-left and center-right governing forces. While offering a more advanced view on how this may occur, it remains unsettled just why governing elites often shift their immigration positions, rather than resist these populist challenges. Such processes may unfold at varying speeds and to different extents (Bale 2008), though the center-right sometimes adopts hardline immigration stances without an electorally strong PRR (Mudde 2013, 8). Such shifts might be aimed to attract voters, or might result from internal ideological debate (Odmalm and Super 2014); other dynamics may interplay with populist challenges of varying strength to pressure traditional right parties toward hardline immigration positions (McKeever 2020). Crucially, accommodation is not the only strategy toward PRR challenges that might work: sometimes holding steadfast against populist challengers, especially upstart ones, works electorally for non-populist governing parties (Meguid 2005). However, the question is not simply about competition for right-wing votes: even center-left parties also sometimes respond to PRR electoral success by becoming more hardline on immigration (Bale et al. 2010).

Within this political science literature, a “contagion” hypothesis has emerged as a way to explain such shifts by non-populist governing elites across the political spectrum in the face of populist challenges. Still, this has not seemed to offer a systematic answer for why security-heavy, hardline immigration positions may be especially “contagious.” The PRR is seen to “tug moderate parties” toward its preferred securitizing stances, even in some cases where PRR parties are electorally weak (Norris 2005, 264), through cascading discursive effects. However, such moves may hold evident risks: “[M]ainstream parties may hesitate to deviate too far away from their long-standing positions, fearing a further haemorrhaging of votes” (Odmalm and Hepburn 2017, 5). More liberal approaches may make sense from an electoral or coalitional perspective (Bale 2008). So, while this literature sketches possible motivations for non-populist securitizing approaches in the face of populist challenges, it does not answer systematically why these securitizing responses may be more appealing than other possibilities.

In sum, these literatures present very different notions of how governing “elites” are likely to respond to populist challenges attacking their security positions as inadequate. The securitization view sees such challenges as presumptively untroubling to existing elites, and easily outmaneuvered. The political science view at the intersection of populism studies and migration politics sees these challenges as possibly effective, though just why existing elites often respond in yielding ways, among other potentially workable responses, is harder to pinpoint. Thus, there does not appear—either within the securitization literature or outside it—to be any ready answer to why powerful insider-elites would so often respond in ways that yield on a purported security issue, where their authority is presumably prohibitive.

Ideational Parallels in Populism and Securitization

While the literatures on securitization of migration and the PRR have often looked at the same phenomena and cases, as this article has underlined, they have remained distinctly out of dialogue with each other. This is evident conceptually: securitization scholarship has not taken specific account of the populism concept, and for the most part, vice versa. Additionally, however, this distance is more subtly underlain by different approaches to their central concepts of interest. The political science literature's more varied view of challenger–elite dynamics has grown from its efforts to develop greater flexibility in analyzing concepts like populism. In bringing these literatures into greater dialogue, securitization scholars may learn from these innovations. Taking a clearer “ideational” approach to securitization—alongside the “ideational” approach that has become increasingly common in populism analysis—exposes striking, and possibly productive, similarities in key ideas that securitization and populism have been seen to mobilize.

Securitization studies’ rigid view of elite–challenger dynamics is both reflected and reproduced by its typical discourse-analytical approaches. Discursive accounts have been similarly influential in populism scholarship, but populism scholars have redressed some of the limits of discursive approaches through repositioning their insights within “ideational” accounts. Populism scholars continue to intensively debate how to define populism (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013, 149–54), but from a securitization studies perspective, the key upshot is how an “ideational” operationalization of populism has become favored among scholars doing empirical research, including on immigration policy effects. This account sees populism as a “thin-centered ideology” with the Manichean people–elite distinction at its core, which in different contexts attaches to various “thicker” ideologies of the left, right, or center (Mudde 2004, 543; Stanley 2008). This view of populism draws from earlier discursive accounts of populism, particularly Laclau's (1977, 2005). However, the ways that discursive approach “blends the substance of populist ideas with how they actually play out in the political sphere” and limits populism to “movements that attract a numerical majority” presented barriers to conceptualizing populist movements as potentially marginal, and as having indeterminate effects on political developments (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, 516). In contrast, the ideational approach does not take these as litmus tests of a true case of populism: through identifying populism's core ideational elements, it more carefully distinguishes the empirical questions of whether distinctively populist ideas are being mobilized, and what effects that mobilization has. These effects can be significant, yet short of those sought within the populist discourse, whereas discursive approaches treat these effects more determinatively. Such an approach allows for analysis of the indeterminate effects of populist mobilizations, including ones from more marginal places.

This resonates strikingly with key sociological critiques of securitization theory, which similarly identify how discursive approaches have limited analysis (Balzacq 2011). Discursive approaches have often blended together the substance of securitization claims (the “logic of security”), how these ideas “actually play out in the political sphere” (if successful, producing exceptionalism), and presumptions about which political actors might seek securitization, given it yields those effects (governing elites). Consequently, securitizing elites are effectively portrayed as attempting to manipulate publics into giving them more power, even though discursive methods offer limited insight into elite strategies (Slaven and Boswell 2019, 1479). Similarly, it has been difficult to envision effects of securitization “moves” between failure and the realization of exceptionalism (Bourbeau 2011, 42). Ideational populism scholars have addressed parallel issues in their field by repositioning the insights of discursive accounts, employing them to help identify the presence of the conceptual logics of interest, but treating their effects as indeterminate, to be investigated through diverse methodological approaches.

Taking a parallel approach toward securitization would allow it to be jointly analyzed alongside populism, by investigating the effects of the mobilization of securitization meanings or “logics,” both from the center of power and from more marginal places. This allows a perspective on securitization where “an issue can very well be about security and at the same time remain within the regular sphere of politics” (Dunn Cavelty and Leese 2018, 53), rather than axiomatically instigating exceptionalism. Indeterminate—and often unintended (Van Rythoven 2020)—effects may follow. Indeed, the idea that there are basic logical elements or claims mobilized in securitization processes has been the most usual view in securitization scholarship (Balzacq 2015a; cf. Ciutǎ 2009), providing a path for analysts to identify such claims as making an issue “about security,” even if previously theorized consequences (such as exceptionalism) do not empirically accompany this fact.

In undertaking such a joint analysis of populism and securitization, it becomes clear that they share key ideational parallels that have not previously been explicitly recognized. Indeed, as has often been said about security politics, “[p]opulist politics is not ordinary, routine politics” (Canovan 1999, 6). If securitization is a “politics of the extraordinary”—contending fundamentally over the content and ends of a community (Balzacq 2019, 343)—then populism clearly operates on similar turf. However, radical-right populism, in particular, articulates these securitarian elements through an inextricable anti-elitism. This raises new questions about how these logics’ commonalities, in tandem with this essential difference, may affect immigration policy developments.

One first clear commonality between populism and securitization logics is both concepts’ pretensions of broad reach, with radical-right populism in particular presenting a homogenizing holism that securitization scholars have associated with Schmittian concepts (Williams 2003). Both hold at their center an essential legitimate political community. As in the logic of security, in the “logic of populism ... the empty place of power is closed by a substantive image of the people as a homogeneous unity” (Abts and Rummens 2007, 406). Thus, populist and securitization claims both purport to represent the whole of the genuine political community, radically simplifying the complex, plural nature of liberal democracy. Both securitization and radical-right populism mobilize this in exclusionary ways against this community's purported enemies. The traditional securitization concept sees this effort as marshaled by top leaders; the PRR, however, renders the enemy as both corrupt elites and their clients, “typically, asylum-seekers, immigrants, [and] minorities” (Canovan 2002, 32).

Second, security and populism share a fixation on the alleged compromising of autonomy, which becomes a “referent object” critically endangered. This reflects the centrality of sovereignty to both. In populism, this is articulated explicitly as popular sovereignty, where the elite's corruption means the people are not ruling. To the PRR, popular sovereignty and national sovereignty are basically equated: the “people” are “both nation and underdog” (Wojczewski 2020, 294), against elites who degrade the nation (Chryssogelos 2020). Such sovereignty concepts frequently render autonomy in reference to racialized notions of community (Nisancioglu 2020). In parallel, as the security agenda widens and entities beyond the state become “referent objects” to secure, autonomy stands out as a critical object for securing. Securitization's logic becomes, “If we do not tackle this problem, everything else will be irrelevant (because we will not be here or will not be free to deal with it in our own way)” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 24, emphasis mine). Painting immigration as threatening to deluge the community strikes at “political autonomy in the double sense of independent identity and functional integrity rather than the physical survival of a political unit” (Huysmans 2006, 61).

Third, despite both populism and securitization's highly charged politics, both present themselves as self-evident, and thereby apolitical. Securitization, in the traditional view, seeks to anesthetize contentious politics in the face of the community's need to survive as itself. Populism's logic is to rescue the community's autonomy and general will as a similarly self-evident, paramount goal. Both are articulated as apolitical common sense. While, in truth, populists attempt to construct “common sense” according to specific ideological images (Patten 1996; Mondon and Winter 2020, 3), populist leaders commonly employ “a language of common sense, a political message that is intended to be non-ideological ... conveying the sense that they are speaking for, and to the ordinary people” (Zaslove 2004, 323). Right-wing populist invocations of security work from a specific Hobbesian mythological vein (Tralau 2011), holding that a need to sanction authority to defeat threats, and to employ security practices analogous to measures sensible in everyday life, is self-evident.

Key differences do arise between these concepts. Populism can be articulated in a wide range of issues from taxes to transportation, many of which are unlikely to be seen as matters of paramount peril. Elite refusal to accept populist formulations will always be portrayed as morally outrageous, but the stakes are not always existential. Security, however, is seen distinctively to press upon issues such an urgent, existential quality, communicating grave consequences for acting inadequately. Thus, these concepts do carry distinct, as well as shared, ideational elements. By no means are all securitizations populist, and vice versa.

Nonetheless, from these similarities, it is clear how radical-right populists might mobilize security claims quite naturally, even credibly. However, populism's anti-elitism gives rise to a very salient difference. Securitization scholarship has usually seen anti-pluralism, the identification of enemies, and a self-evident need to survive as oneself as expressed through an exceptionalism that empowers elites to act beyond normal rules, contrasted with “normal” plural democratic politics. Populism scholarship, however, sees not this dyad but rather a triad: elitism and pluralism do oppose each other as in the securitization view, but populism constitutes a distinct concept in opposition to both elitism and pluralism (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, 514). If radical-right populism in particular expresses essential anti-pluralist ideas of community and threat, it does so through a core of anti-elitism that foils governing elites’ moral authority.

What do these ideational similarities and tensions mean for how immigration issues are politically contested? The securitization of migration has often been attributed to the vested interests of elite security professionals and politicians in prompting it (Bigo 2002; Boswell 2008; Karyotis 2011). If populism expresses key securitarian ideas in an anti-elitist way, however, a need emerges to re-examine such presumed dynamics.

Case and Methods

The puzzle this article identifies is how, from positions outside decisive circles of power, populists may successfully challenge governing elites by characterizing immigration as a security threat, when securitization theory has seen governing elites as possessing presumptive authority over defining purported security issues. Political science literatures focusing on migration and populism offer more advanced concepts for understanding why governing elites may shift issue positions, and they have analyzed populist “logics” that possess potentially significant similarities to how securitization has been ideationally characterized. Nonetheless, we know relatively little about how these conceptual relationships may help PRR challengers to push governing elites toward their positions, “mainstreaming” these views and securitizing immigration policy.

To examine this puzzle, process tracing stands out as a potentially revealing approach, as it can expose the political reasonings underlying these processes (Checkel 2006). Process tracing seeks to uncover “causal mechanisms” that operate between larger social conditions and specific outcomes in politics or policy. Causal mechanisms “tell us how things happen: how actors relate, how individuals come to believe what they do or what they draw from past experiences, how policies and institutions endure or change” (Falleti and Lynch 2009, 1147). Drawing mainly on contemporaneous documents and elite interviews (Checkel 2008), process tracing can reveal these reasonings, when policymaker motives “may be excluded from the official discourse” (Karyotis 2012, 400). Gleaning theoretical implications from how these processes unfold requires creating “theoretically explicit narratives” (Falleti 2016, 457), carefully sequencing causal processes and relating them to the key theoretical concepts under examination.

To address this article's research question through such an approach, a single-case study is appropriate. Process tracing requires the collection of detailed within-case data (Tansey 2007, 765), making large-N studies infeasible. Beyond this, the richness of case-study data makes single-case studies well suited for the purpose of generating initial theoretical propositions about a new relationship under exploration (Gerring 2004, 349–50)—in this case, the relationship between populism and securitization in migration politics—which may be tested in further cases. To address this article's research question, this article conducts an “explaining outcome” form of process tracing (Beach and Pedersen 2013, 18–21), which is oriented around the explanation of a puzzling case outcome, and may shed theoretical light that “reach[es] beyond the single case” (Beach and Pedersen 2013, 19). In this article, the outcome to be explained is non-populist governing elites yielding to populist challenges over immigration as a purported security issue. This is foremost puzzling, as discussed, in relation to the securitization literature; while political science literatures readily acknowledge such developments and have proposed hypotheses about them (e.g., the “contagion hypothesis”), there has not been corresponding consensus about the reasons underlying them.

This article applies this approach through the case of the securitization of immigration policy in the US border state of Arizona between 2004 and 2010, at the end of which the state enacted its well-known “show-me-your-papers” law, SB 1070 (see Santa Ana and González de Bustamante 2012). Developments in Arizona have been recognized as representative of the outcomes under investigation in terms of two main theoretical lenses examined in this article, though in such broad phenomena, there will be no cases that are perfectly representative. Within security studies, Arizona has been employed as a typical case for theorizing about various aspects of the securitization of migration (Doty 2009; Squire 2015; Williams 2016). From the political science perspective, developments in Arizona have been recognized as key events in the path to the Trump presidency (Martin 2017, 166), where the United States has constituted a major case within the larger transnational “mainstreaming” of populist, radical, and far-right immigration politics, suitable to analyze alongside European cases (Mudde 2019; Mondon and Winter 2020). Arizona appears to be a clear case of “contagion,” where actors across the political spectrum moved toward more hardline immigration stances—a phenomenon observed across a very wide variety of cases, varying in national contexts and in institutional features such as electoral systems or multilevel governance. In this respect, the clearest particularity in US politics is that its strongly rooted two-party system has led radical-right elements to be more readily accommodated within the major parties, rather than these elements tending to form distinct PRR parties, as is most common in other electoral systems (Mudde 2019, 130). While this case characteristic may inhibit analysis dependent on identifying and examining the interactions of populist and non-populist parties per se, process-tracing research allows for more detailed investigations of individual political actors or factions, allowing richer understandings of their ideational representations.

As a case, Arizona presents some complexities; in particular, the halt of the securitization effort in 2011 grew from distinct dynamics, beyond this article's scope (Slaven 2016). The decline in the PRR's success there also means that Arizona is not representative of the subset of cases in which populists directly securitize immigration policy after they gain formal control over this policy domain. Nonetheless, as this article has outlined, the question of how, from the outside, populists successfully challenge governing elites over immigration as a security issue is at the crux of the puzzle about the PRR's rise to greater influence, since this challenge has been the indispensable element for increasing their power (Ivarsflaten 2008). In this sense, Arizona represents a typical case for the purposes of this process-tracing research, as it appears representative of the cross-case relationship at the puzzle's core (Seawright and Gerring 2008, 299–300).

This analysis draws from twenty-seven semi-structured interviews with Arizona policymakers active between 2004 and 2010, and analysis of more than 600 media and government documents. Interviewees were selected by “decisional sampling,” identifying those involved in policy decisions that composed the process under investigation (Knoke 1993), as well as snowball sampling. The sample included some PRR border-hawk politicians, but mostly comprised non-populist officials of both parties. Interviews and documents were coded both thematically and sequentially, in order to build a “theoretically explicit narrative” (Falleti 2016). This article makes an original contribution through a narrative that is “theoretically explicit” in relation to both securitization theory and populism, permitting an analysis of the interplay of these aspects of the case.

Arizona's Governing Elites and the Populist Border-Security Challenge

The Arizona portion of the US–Mexico border became the main site for unauthorized border crossing into the United States by 2000, and by 2004, immigration was becoming the dominant issue in the state political system. The issue was chiefly championed by border-hawk politicians who were clearly security-oriented and populist in the PRR mold. Consider two emblematic statements¹ from elected immigration hardliners, part of a clearly identifiable PRR faction in the state Republican Party. The first is from the state legislator Steve Smith:

The security things are commonsensical. You would hope that your nation is secured. Why do you have a fence around your back yard? Why do you have a lock on your door? … [Y]ou would hope that the simple, most fundamental tenet of any government is to protect your people. Of course! Yeah, duh, you've got to put a fence up. You've got to put a lock on your door. You've got to put a gate up. And so that is so … self-evident to people that it's, “Yeah, you mean it isn't being done that way?”

Here, populism and security connect through—while both adding something to—a distinct account of common sense. In populist fashion, Smith points to the obviousness of the solution refused by governing elites (a fence). This complements the common sense of security, the need to survive or defend oneself—which Smith expresses, in Hobbesian terms, as the “most fundamental tenet” of government. Immigration is a threat, and common sense offers obvious ways to guard against it. This downplays the claim's contentiousness, presenting the PRR idea as obvious, even banal. “Common sense” creates a vector by which governing elites’ security judgments can be impugned: They are dismissing obvious solutions to a dangerous problem. This is outrageous and corrupt.

The second statement is from Russell Pearce, the legislator who led Arizona's border-hawk movement, speaking to colleagues about business opposition to his measures:

I stand on the side of citizens, not a bunch of businessmen. ... [I]t's your responsibility, who take the oath of office, to defend these laws and protect our citizens! You can't keep passing the buck to somebody else! ... You bear the burden and responsibility of the costs and the maimings and the death! (Arizona State Legislature 2011)

Pearce's characterization of “illegal” immigration reflects the tendency of PRR politicians to invoke law-and-order concepts (Jungar and Jupskås 2014, 226), drawing from the PRR's right-wing “host” ideology that insists on a strictly ordered society (Rooduijn 2014, 82). Crucially, however, it renders this issue in a moralized, anti-elitist way. Mapping the Manicheanism of lawbreaking and law-keeping (Tonry 2009) onto the populist people–elite distinction, this articulation places “elites” in the crosshairs of a highly charged political attack, accused of unconscionably and corruptly letting loose dangerous outsider criminals (“illegal immigrants”) upon citizens (the “people”). A broad responsibilization in responding to threat, typical of securitization logics (Slaven 2016, 234–47), serves as the launchpad for this attack, as any hesitancy in responding allegedly evidences corruption. Elites’ dismissal of this “common sense” is not merely a corrupt moral failing—the consequences are deadly.

If this is what PRR challengers say, how does it shape what governing elites do? Such statements may appear extreme and thus safely ignored. Indeed, in Arizona, this is at first what happened: Pearce's efforts on immigration were considered outlandish, and other politicians did not take them seriously (Sinema 2012). Pearce continuously synthesized the crisis of what he called an “illegal invasion” (quoted in Robbins 2008) with an alleged refusal by elites in both parties to truly address it: “Nobody's doing a dadgum thing, ’cause you've got weak-kneed, simple politicians who are refusing to do their duty.” Such dismissive stances, though, were soon perceived as under sharp political pressure.

Reading the Populist Border-Security Challenge

Arizona's governing elites quickly began to see these particularly populist articulations of security as making the issue of immigration impossible for them to ignore. Underscoring the populist affinity for plebiscites (Barney and Laycock 1999), in 2004, Arizona border hawks employed the state's institutions of direct democracy to put a policy proposal directly to voters. Proposition 200 took aim at unauthorized immigrants allegedly receiving public benefits and voting—the former a frequent bugbear of the PRR transnationally (Schumacher and van Kersbergen 2016), the latter allegedly undermining the “functional integrity” (Huysmans 2006, 61) of the genuine community to decide political matters autonomously. The connection to border-security concern was clearly reflected in the name of the proposition's campaign group, “Protect Arizona Now.” A bipartisan group of political elites opposed Proposition 200, arguing that fraud problems did not exist and that new ID requirements would adversely affect citizens. Yet, as the border-hawk politician Randy Graf said about gathering petition signatures to place the proposition on the ballot: “When you told folks in its simplest form that this bill is going to require proof of citizenship for people to register to vote and an ID card when you go to the polls to vote[,] and proof of citizenship or legal residency when they register for welfare, they couldn't sign it fast enough. Just common sense. Simple measures” (“Proposition 200 in Arizona” 2004).

Proposition 200’s victory at the polls triggered a broad reconsideration of the politics of immigration among Arizona's governing elites. Populist border hawks were Republicans vying for power within their party, but immigration was also an issue for Democrats not aiming to woo the far right, since Proposition 200 had won support from a wide array of voters (Billeaud 2004). Non-populist politicians’ first principal response, as might be expected (Bale et al. 2010), was to try to downplay or directly combat the populist border hawks’ conception of the problem. Such arguments held that problems at the border, while real, were not the crisis they were made out to be, and that in the US federal system, the issue was not the state government's to solve. As 2005 progressed, however, a sense grew that this strategy was failing. “We tried saying, ‘Look, gang, nothing has really changed. These are longstanding issues that are getting more attention, but nothing has fundamentally changed,’” recounted Jeanine L'Ecuyer, the communications director for the Democratic governor. “It didn't get traction with the media, it didn't get traction with the public.” Immediately, populist border hawks began pushing an expanded legislative program to use Arizona's criminal justice system to target unauthorized immigrants.

Governing elites began to see the populist border-security challenge as resistant to initial responses, and thus politically threatening. But why, so soon after the PRR's first taste of success, did those with greater power and presumed authority decide that their arguments were going nowhere? For one, the simplicity of the border-hawk argument created particular dynamics, growing from populism and security's convergent “common sense.” PRR arguments were simple, resonating in a soundbite-driven media. Simplicity allowed Proposition 200 to win despite broad governing-elite opposition. Mike Haener, a top gubernatorial aide, summarized that, “They don't really have to run a campaign .... The messaging is, ‘Illegal means illegal.’” As Jennifer J. Burns, a centrist Republican legislator, recounted, “It's easy to say, ‘Build a fence.’ It takes more sentences to say, ‘A fence isn't gonna work because you can't stop the water coming across the border, and because you have mountains, and because they can build a tunnel.’” Offering more nuanced responses to parry populist charges taxed the attention spans of voters. “The media also like fear, because, frankly, that's their stock-in-trade,” L'Ecuyer observed. An atmosphere of escalating anxiety over immigration, where media were happy to cover the story and non-populist elites struggled to convey nuance, was seen as ripe for populist border hawks’ simplistic appeals.

Second, governing elites began to think this positioning came off as excuse-making to restive voters, which played into the hands of populist challengers. There was growing acceptance that the border was a security issue, where voters seemed to broadly spread responsibility among officials, notwithstanding jurisdictional barriers. As Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democratic state legislator, put it, contending border security was a federal responsibility was “a legalistic argument that doesn't have any emotional resonance with voters.” Terry Goddard, a Democrat serving as the elected state attorney general, recounted the dilemma that non-populist politicians faced in countering populist accusations that “weak-kneed, simple politicians” were doing nothing on border security:

It's awfully hard to say as an Arizona state official, “This is a federal problem and the federal response has been totally inadequate.” And that, again, plays into Russell [Pearce]’s hands, who says, “Well, if the feds are missing ... then we in the state have to take action.” And frankly I see why that's such a powerful statement, because the feds had failed! ... So now, as somebody who thinks there are other, better, more humane and economically viable solutions, you start in a hole.

Governing elites perceived a need to respond sympathetically to a sense of public anxiety, and to admit there was a border-security problem—even if it was not what the border hawks argued, and the state had unclear authority to address it. Faced with arguments that problems are complex, “Populists claim that all this complexity is a self-serving racket perpetuated by professional politicians, and that the solutions to the problems ordinary people care about are essentially simple” (Canovan 1999, 6). Indeed, as Pearce would commonly claim, “It's a very simple issue: enforce the law” (Arizona State Legislature 2011). Non-populist politicians had little difficulty understanding why such messages seemed to succeed, drawing from both its moralized anti-elitism and its common-sense presentation. “The public has very little knowledge, really, about laws,” explained Bill Brotherton, a Democratic legislator. “So they don't like to hear somebody just saying, ‘Well, you can’t do that.’”

With a dismissive or combative strategy falling flat and continued pressure from populist border hawks, governing elites feared the further radicalization of border-security discourses. As L'Ecuyer explained, “Initially the idea was, ‘Let's keep stating fact. Let's keep saying what the law is.’ And as it went on, it became increasingly clear that politically that was not going to be a tenable position. ... Frankly, because [Pearce] wouldn't stop.”

Devising the Governing-Elite Solution: Security and Demoticism

Non-populist elites across Arizona's political spectrum then settled on political strategies that shared broad similarities, and which all sought to address the immigration issue with both its populist and its security character in mind. The common thread of non-populists’ response was to dismiss PRR ideas to the extent possible, while accepting the security nature of the problem, public anxiety, and some state government policy role—then offering solutions they saw as justifiable and politically resonant. “Without that sense of security, it was abundantly clear that not only politically was it not going anywhere, but that the public was not going to buy into it,” L'Ecuyer explained. Sinema, the legislator, described an approach that became broadly typical among non-populist elites:

What I started to do was a strategy that I felt was more effective. ... What you have to say is, “I see that you're worried, it makes sense that you're worried, of course you're worried, that's normal and valid to be worried, and here are some ideas that could work better than the proposal that you've been offered.” And so to try to offer better solutions.

The key element to this approach was solicitude toward public anxiety, which would gain credibility for “better solutions.” A sense had emerged that failure to offer alternatives was reifying the PRR's claim to the moral high ground over the problem. “The last thing you need is people out there saying, ‘Jeez, Russell [Pearce] is the only guy doing stuff. This must be the only thing you can do,’” Dennis Burke, the governor's chief of staff, explained.

A sense emerged among non-populist elites that public support could not be garnered without some kind of action on the border. As Jonathan Paton, a Republican legislator, summarized it, “[my] district wanted something to be done.” Paton, who saw PRR proposals as popular but unsubstantial, asked, “what could we do about border issues for our district that would actually accomplish something?” Paton's answer was to advance bills bringing the state into anti-smuggling enforcement. These were aimed to win governing elites’ support, while also reaching the voter angst providing the basic material for populist border-security politics. This was a typical response for Republicans, who looked to both anxious constituents and a farther-right party grassroots prepared to paint them as inert and corrupt in primary elections. Russ Jones, another non-populist Republican legislator, recounted devising “counter-bills” to steal PRR thunder by addressing immigration issues in more moderate ways. These offered a “safe haven for [Republicans] who wanted to look more to the right,” he explained.

However, the fact that Democrats also saw danger underscored that taking border-security action had become a major issue not just on the right, but at the political center. Democrats increasingly supported state and local law-enforcement action related to border issues, putting aside earlier categorical objections. The Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, in August 2005 declared an emergency in Arizona's border counties. Though concretely a modest fiscal maneuver, the declaration used a simple appeal, to the language of emergency, to usurp the PRR. Rather than cede the issue to figures like Pearce, “part of what we wanted to do was allow [Napolitano] to be the voice of the issue,” Burke explained. Napolitano would often describe her border policies as common sense, combining new law-enforcement actions with criticism of federal authorities.

The effort governing elites engaged in was overall relatively nuanced—never accepting populist border-security claims wholesale, though pitched to voters on some of the same terms that populists had used. While in shaping policy, governing elites often relied on conceptions of border-security problems that were complex, their measures aimed to be rendered politically as common sense. For instance, the focus on creating a state enforcement role against smuggling and trafficking contrasted with the PRR vision of widespread local enforcement of immigration laws. However, both relied on similar symbolism. As L'Ecuyer recalled, most Arizona voters at this time perceived that “if there is a problem and you send a cop, you can put it in the category in your mind of ‘problem solved.’” The fact that cops were sent to combat drug- and people-smuggling operations, rather than conducting sweeps against settled labor migrants as border hawks demanded, did not dim this resonance.

In securitizing immigration this way, were governing elites engaging in a “thin” populism (Jagers and Walgrave 2007)? Their reactions are described more accurately as “demotic” (March 2017), or as aiming for a closeness to ordinary people. In ideational definitions of populism, demoticism can characterize populism but does not make it, since populism requires ideational commitment to the Manichean people–elite distinction. However, it is clear in Arizona that the populist border-security challenge motivated governing elites to behave in particular ways that were shaped by a need to respond to the PRR's specifically populist articulation of security: The chief political problem became demonstrating a closeness to the anxious, threatening popular understanding of immigration that the PRR used to attack existing elites. This was achieved through mobilizing symbolic capital like law enforcement, the reserve military (National Guard), and emergency action.

Crucially, governing elites saw this as providing political capital to oppose what they saw as PRR extremism. As Tim Nelson, the governor's general counsel, explained:

There were some [proposals] that just seemed so clearly unconstitutional or damaging. ... [Napolitano] tried to strike a balance between recognizing that the impetus ... was a clear public sentiment that something needed to be done, and an effort to try to make sure that what did get done didn't do more damage than good.

Such calculations lack the Manicheanism of populism, as well as its radical drive. This response was much more about tactically managing a political problem—showing solicitude for public concern while maintaining a sense of policy's complexity, accepting public opinion, but not a general will. Nonetheless, this corrosion of governing elites’ authority over defining the security issue had led the security nature of the problem to be considered unchallengeable, as governing elites kept themselves on guard against populists who stood ready to paint any restraint as blithe, corrupt, and perilous.

Patterns Emerging from the Populism–Security Dynamic

This interplay of populist and non-populist political strategies over border security led across years to continual, piecemeal securitization of immigration, enveloping increasing areas of state policy. This pattern was rooted in a particular feature of the synergy that the PRR had captured between populist and securitization logics. While security's purported status as an “exceptional” treatment of an issue has typically been seen to license extraordinary elite authority over the issue, empirically, Arizona's governing elites perceived very different issue dynamics. Explaining why certain policy areas ought to be encompassed by the border-security agenda required argumentation for not just why a facet of the issue should be treated differently than before, but also the boundaries of such treatment. Why accept this in one area the PRR demands (unauthorized working), but not others (undocumented children attending school)? Boundaries raise questions. Arizona's governing elites found themselves constantly pressured to justify such boundaries, in ways populist border hawks were not. Non-populists perceived that the populist hand was freer than their own when it came to the arguing for securitized policy, as governing elites saw their need to prove their credibility amid ongoing challenge as a process without any clear endpoint (Slaven 2016, 159–62).

Among Republicans, non-populist policymakers felt growing pressure to fall in line with securitizing PRR proposals toward “illegal immigration,” or stand accused in populist fashion of selling out voters. “You had to start using all of the platitudes. ‘I'm for a secure border, I’m for the rule of law.’ ... ‘Illegal means illegal,’ or something like that,” Rich Crandall, a non-populist Republican legislator, explained. However, this did not immunize such figures from withering populist attack. “It's just a ploy,” Pearce explained. “It's that doublespeak that they get away with, ’cause everybody wants border security. Not really, but everybody talks as if they do. ... They never vote for anything to really do it. The public has such a disdain for our politicians, and I understand that. I share that with them.” The populist attack was still at the ready, primed to push securitization further.

The PRR's influence within the Republican Party further offered continued opportunities to test the political center. The broadening border-hawk agenda pressed governing elites’ boundaries on issues like local enforcement of immigration laws and punishing employers of unauthorized immigrants. The PRR's ability to take its proposals directly to the ballot, as it had done in Proposition 200, created a looming credible threat of subverting elite opposition. Accusations that Arizona's politicians were not doing enough did not always endanger many non-populist incumbents, but it did change their approach to immigration. They were inscribing securitization—accepting relatively preferable measures that securitized the labor market and expanded the state role for enforcement against “border crime,” among other issues. Yet, by the time the “show-me-your-papers” law SB 1070 was proposed in 2010, Goddard, the attorney general, recounted, “The hysteria, or the rush to find a quick, easy and understandable solution, was so intense that nobody wanted to hear, for example, that fifty percent or more of the people in this country without documentation came across legally.” Simplistic, moralized, populist invocations of border-security threat had become the overwhelming echo throughout Arizona's immigration politics.

Conclusion

This article has explored how the PRR can successfully challenge governing elites in characterizing immigration as a security threat, and has sought to unlock the puzzle of why elites may yield to such a challenge, when the securitization literature has considered elite authority over purported security issues as presumptively invulnerable. This analysis identified key ideational linkages between securitization and populist mobilizations in notions of holism, autonomy, and ostensible apoliticism. However, through populism's core, moralized people–elite dichotomy, populists may articulate securitarian meanings in ways that cast governing elites as corrupt and part of the security problem, rather than the only competent authorities to effect a solution. Through analyzing the securitization of migration in Arizona, this article suggests that populism and securitization logics can work together to move governing elites to inscribe securitizing policies, as they adopt defensive political strategies to counter populist outsiders’ ability to articulate threat while impugning elite authority. The securitization of migration can therefore grow from the inversion of the elite-dominated power dynamics that have been theoretically presumed to drive this process.

The close ideational relationship between populism and securitization might help to explain why securitization scholars—even when studying an issue as plainly affected by populism as immigration—have not typically accounted for populism. Despite populism's very different image of governing elites, the concepts’ similarities might mask populism's significance. In another way, these similarities might raise a question about the engine of populist security appeals. When they succeed politically, is it because they are security, or because they are populist? This analysis suggests that both elements are key: Their co-resonance is essential, but both of them present distinct qualities necessary to shaping governing-elite responses. In Arizona, populist border hawks impugned governing elites as corruptly aligned with lawbreaking foreigners against the law-abiding “people,” and articulated a “common sense” that offered symbolically resonant solutions. This corroded governing elites’ authority over defining the issue. The issue's security quality made the problem urgent, bringing forth a public fearfulness and broad responsibilization that made governing elites determine the issue could not be ignored, where initially this had seemed to be a potentially viable political strategy. Both elements together—corroded authority and alleged urgency—are necessary for understanding how elites responded: through demotic positioning (March 2017), gesturing toward alleviating the perceived security fears of ordinary people. With continued PRR pressure, however, this approach meant continually inscribing securitized policies, beyond what governing elites naturally preferred.

While single-case studies carry limits to their generalizability, this article's case-study design is well equipped to inform initial theory generation (Rueschemeyer 2003) on populism–securitization dynamics. Theoretically, this article's findings challenge presumptions typical in securitization scholarship about governing elites’ vested interests in driving securitization processes, and the authority or legitimacy they are presumed to accrue through these processes (Bigo 2002; Karyotis 2011). In Arizona, governing elites did securitize immigration to gain control over the issue. However, they saw little political benefit in this besides defending themselves from populists demanding even more hardline policies. Indeed, it was easier for populist challengers to make politically effective security claims—or, at least, this is empirically how governing elites saw it. Populists’ security claims resonated credibly with their larger worldview, while non-populist elites argued more nuanced positions and engaged in constant rear-guard action. These findings suggest the need for greater empirical interrogation of governing elites’ political interests in advancing securitization, in further case studies that can test for these sorts of unexpected power dynamics.

Methodologically, this article shows how securitization scholarship might draw from innovations in “ideational” populism scholarship (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017) to guide investigations of how mobilized ideas affect political developments, without presuming particular political effects—something security studies have often done in relating security to sovereign decisionism and exceptionalism (Hagmann, Hegemann, and Neal 2018). The potential theoretical insights of such approaches underline the importance of efforts by Balzacq and others to refine definitions of these key security qualities, so as to observe them at play politically (Balzacq 2011, 2015b). This allows methodologies such as process tracing to take on a larger role in examining the varied politics of securitization, and in advancing sociological securitization scholarship.

Normatively, critical security scholarship has long worked to recover more positive, democratic politics against elite moves that sow insecurity (Aradau 2004; Huysmans 2006). Accounting for populism within securitization processes, however, complicates this issue. Populist accounts of security may be more exclusionary than governing-elite ideologies, while possessing particular potential to disrupt elite authority. Of course, populism is dubiously democratic (Canovan 2002). Yet this article suggests that if populism is a “pathological normalcy” of democracy (Mudde 2013, 16)—a radicalization of certain inherent democratic values, like popular sovereignty—fostering greater formal democratic accountability on security issues through institutions like ballot initiatives, or generally weakening elite security authority, may raise the populist specter, thereby posing new exclusionary possibilities.

As with any single-case study, this article's findings come with limitations and caveats. The single-case design of this study cannot identify the general social conditions or opportunity structures that allow for PRR success, which would require a comparative approach—though the evidence from Arizona suggests that its institutions of direct democracy, and media dynamics favoring populists, were important in lending the state's populist border hawks leverage. While this article has examined how populist challengers may mount initially successful challenges against governing elites through portraying immigration as a threat—an essential ingredient in populists’ increased power (Ivarsflaten 2008)—it does not shed light on the distinct dynamics of increasingly frequent cases where populist politicians directly govern immigration. In such cases, the relationship between populism and securitization may look significantly different. Beyond this issue, other questions arise: Can populism play a similar role in the securitization of issues other than migration? Can security and populism be mobilized effectively together only by the PRR, or also by left-wing populists? Both may well be less likely than the kinds of developments this article examines, but would require further research to determine.

Nonetheless, this article offers a clear finding that suggests that populism may be a substantially more significant concept for securitization analysis than has been previously acknowledged. While recent “populist hype” (De Cleen, Glynos, and Mondon 2018) has sometimes seen the populism label too loosely applied, this case study has observed the significance of specific populist elements—especially the moralized people–elite distinction—to advancing securitization developments. Populism resonates with securitization logics in previously unrecognized ways—but, through a core anti-elitist twist to securitization claims, populism may fuel new challenger–elite dynamics, thereby opening a broader array of possible avenues by which securitized policies can emerge. Above all, therefore, this article has shown that the palpable relationship between populism and the securitization of immigration does, in fact, seem substantiated—if securitization analysts adopt approaches that enable greater joint analysis of these two highly salient, co-resonant concepts.

Acknowledgments

I thank Michael Lister, Pontus Odmalm, Nina Perkowski, Christina Boswell, Edwin Bacon, Hugh Bochel, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. I also thank participants at the European Workshops in International Studies, Cardiff, and the conference “International Security after Brexit and Trump” at the Centre for Security Research, Edinburgh.

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the University of Edinburgh.

Footnotes

References