Search

When migrants and displaced people make claims about their rights to be political and become acting political subjects, they challenge conventional notions of political and political communities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Prague with Ukrainian citizens displaced by the 2022 Russian invasion, this article brings into conversation critical citizenship studies and literature on solidarity with refugees to explore the political acts of displaced Ukrainians and the solidarity practices of local activists. By doing so, the article focuses on the intricate transformations that (re)shape politics in terms of new subjectivities and social relations. When displaced people from Ukraine disrupted presumptions about their political invisibility and formed synergetic solidarity relations with local activists, their actions made new ways of relating and caring possible. This further transformed their political subjectivities from claimants of rights to Czech society (and its institutions) to claimants of rights within Czech society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing number of refugees are being resettled in U.S. cities that have been historically populated by urban poor, immigrants, and racial minorities. This study examines how urban refugees' claims-making process may be informed by civil rights and political activism of the local established residents of migrant and minoritized communities on the ground. Based on a case study of Syrian refugees residing in a central city in New Jersey, the study uses mixed method of in-depth interviews, field observations, historical archives, and demographic data. The findings show that the newly arriving Syrian refugees, resettled in a city grounded in history of civil rights and political activism, formed alliances with other long-term migrants and minoritized groups to claim their own political and legal rights, advocate for state resources, and resist social inequalities. Although Syrian refugees acknowledged their protected legal and citizenship rights, the actual process of enacting these rights and claims-making involved active relationships with other racial and migrant groups in the city. The study illustrates how refugees are articulating their agency through producing social and political spaces in connection with other spaces of urban marginality – a process that reveals how urban spaces can also become important sites for articulating new politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of deception and dishonesty is widely accepted as a fact of life in policing. This paper thus defends a counterintuitive claim: Good faith is a normative foundation for the police as a political institution. Good faith is a core value of contracts, and policing is contractual in nature both broadly (as a matter of social contract theory) and narrowly (in regard to concrete encounters between law enforcement officers and the public). Given the centrality of good faith to policing, dishonesty and deception on par with fraud are justified only as a narrowly circumscribed investigative tool that is constrained by institutional commitments to the fair distribution of security and the rule of law. The practical upshot is the preclusion of most dishonest and deceptive police tactics on par with fraud, leading to an institution that is less proactive and more reactive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not all numerical minorities classify as 'minorities' in any political or legal sense, even when they possess easily definable biological or social characteristics. Twins are an example of such a group. The article discusses minorities as the result of minority building, i.e., a process through which some specific human characteristic becomes the basis of group identity, networking, mobilization, and claims on rights and recognition. It presents some of the existing discourse and research on twins as a biological and social category. Subsequent sections inspect twins' potential claims and mobilization. Many of the claims refer to our culture's treatment of twins as one social unit, and to the assumption of a 'special bond' between them. Although probably not a biological reality, it is a strong social reality with effect on twins' lives. The idea of the 'special bond' conflicts with the prevailing Western discourse on individual personhood and agency. Not unlike other such efforts, a possible twins' activism would need to find a balance between essentialist and constructionist definitions of the group. The essentialist discourse is part of the claimed problem, but at the same time, it may be necessary in order to legitimate the minority's claim for recognition. Twins are hardly a repressed minority, but there are specific situations in which they could claim for recognition and more sensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agenda cueing is a theorized mechanism whereby news consumers form judgments of relative social issue importance based on exposure to media coverage. Agenda cueing entails taking issue importance signals from surface features of news presentations, such as the mere frequency of the topic's coverage. This study relies on an experimental stimulus simulating an interface of a major news platform, puts this hypothesis to the test in the context of an aggregated digital newsfeed, and investigates whether cues coming from different gatekeepers produce varying agenda-setting effects. The analysis reveals that interface features presenting the newsfeed as an algorithmic selection of mainstream media content ("top stories") had a more powerful effect on individuals' perceptions of issue importance than cues attributing newsfeed's curation to other users of the news platform. The moderating role of gatekeeping trust is replicated only partially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep Self views of moral responsibility have been criticized for positing mysterious concepts, making nearly paradoxical claims about the ownership of one's mental states, and promoting self-deceptive moral evasion. I defend Deep Self views from these pervasive forms of skepticism by arguing that some criticism is hasty and stems from epistemic injustice regarding testimonies of experiences of alienation, while other criticism targets contingent features of Deep Self views that ought to be abandoned. To aid in this project, I provide original naturalistic analyses of "Self" and "internality" that replace the view's metaphorical language with common-sensical concepts that make clear their usefulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People often believe that they do more than their fair share of work. This tendency plays out across daily life, from married couples to workplace collaborations. While the inclination to "over-claim" credit is pervasive and has potentially serious consequences, little is known about the factors that make it more or less likely to occur. This article considers two predictors--group size and the role of indirect participants, such as supervisors, teachers, coaches, and office assistants--on the phenomenon known as over-claiming. It offers practical steps for individuals, managers, and organizations to take to moderate the damaging effects of over-claiming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic research after the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan-controlled Azad Kashmir, this article uses 'disaster citizenship' as a conceptual lens focusing on how people renegotiated their relationships with the state in the context of political interventions for reconstruction. The promise of relief encouraged the poor to make new claims on the state as disaster victims and needy citizens deserving material assistance. Given the social and political inequalities and limited democratic rights in post-disaster Azad Kashmir, people pursued a politics of citizenship that resisted both notions of liberal rights and neoliberal politics of self-responsibility, seeking instead rightful material dependence on the state. This dependence was ambivalent and precarious as the poor were often deprived of the material rights they claimed. Therefore, disaster citizenship remained deeply entangled with social dependencies, and people had to resort to favors, bribes, and submissive patron-client relationships to access state resources and counter their political neglect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on original ethnographic material, this piece explores the relationship between legally precarious Latina migrants and the co-ethnic activists serving as their advocates and mentors, treating this relationship as generative of a dynamic process of being and becoming political for migrant women and youth in the metropolitan US South. I adopt an intersectional and intergenerational feminist lens to analyze Latino educational and civic engagement programs in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, showing how migrant mothers, daughters, activists, and educators inside these programs became variously implicated in cultivating and performing new right claims to the local community. Overall, the piece contributes to theorizing the intertwined normative and subversive dimensions of lived citizenship, showing how intersubjective processes and radical acts of care are central to the ways racialized migrants re-imagine citizenship and belonging in hostile new destinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many have claimed that whenever an investigation might provide evidence for a claim, it might also provide evidence against it. Similarly, many have claimed that your credence should never be on the edge of the range of credences that you think might be rational. Surprisingly, both of these principles imply that you cannot rationally be modest : you cannot be uncertain what the rational opinions are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocacy organizations have reframed immigrants as deserving, and improved their access to services and support; yet, we know little about how low-income immigrants understand organizational frames to make individual requests in public institutions and programmes. Analyzing in-depth interviews and fieldwork over multiple years, we show how Filipina/o and Latina/o immigrants become empowered to make claims through an organization's frame of low-income residents as rightful community members in San Francisco – a self-declared "sanctuary" city where residents have formal access and protections regardless of immigrant or legal status. However, despite newfound confidence and rights awareness, Latina/o participants continually anticipate racialized treatment where others construct them as inferior and illegitimate, which depresses their claims-making. In contrast, Filipina/o participants felt othered in public programmes and institutions, but not blocked by feelings of mistreatment and illegitimacy. We push for attention to how racialization differentially operates for immigrant groups and affects the claims-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with the problem that arises where multiple innocent claimants have contributed to a mixed fund that is now insufficient to meet all of their claims, English and Australian courts have suggested three solutions: (i) the rule in Clayton's Case; (ii) the 'simple pari passu' approach; and (iii) the 'rolling charge' or 'North American' approach. In Caron v Jahani (No 2) the New South Wales Court of Appeal adopted a simplified version of the third solution: the 'simplified rolling charge' approach. In doing so, the Court demonstrated that once the rule in Clayton's Case is (rightly) discarded, what remains is not simply a binary choice between the second and third solutions. We argue that English courts should revisit their approach to the problem posed at the outset by jettisoning the rule in Clayton's Case and by adopting the simplified rolling charge approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do individuals choose to advance legal claims to social welfare goods? To explore this question, I turn to the case of South Africa, where, despite the adoption of a "transformative" constitution in 1996, access to social welfare goods remains sorely lacking. Drawing on an original 551-person survey, I examine patterns of legal claimsmaking, focusing on beliefs individuals hold about the law, rights, and the state, and how those beliefs relate to decisions about whether and how to make claims. I find striking differences between the factors that influence when people say they should file a legal claim and when they actually do so. The way that individuals interpret their own material conditions and neighborhood context are important, yet under-acknowledged, factors for explaining claims-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the East Timor Alert Network's (ETAN) claims‐making strategies regarding support for human rights and self‐determination of East Timor during the Indonesian occupation from 1975–1998. This research seeks to understand how ETAN attempted to persuade Canadians to care about a geographically distant horror. I examine various claims‐making strategies that ETAN used to encourage Canadian audiences to evaluate the problem as an object of public concern, the Timorese as victims deserving of their sympathy, and Canadian government as condemnation‐worthy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of History in Africa: A Journal of Method is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

All kinds of actors, elected and unelected, make claims to represent certain constituencies. This article sheds new light on what this practice of representative claims-making might imply for the legitimacy of the liberal world order. It develops a quality of representation index at the level of representative claims and introduces a novel dataset. First, the article introduces the information criterion as key benchmark against which to evaluate representative claims. Second, it constructs a quality of representation index based on this criterion and uses it to assess representative claims. Third, multivariate analysis corroborates differences between various makers while controlling for context. Bridging the divide between political theory and empirical political sociology, this article reveals that the supporters of the current liberal democratic world order make significantly lower quality representative claims than various challengers. A range of new avenues for both theoretical and empirical research ensues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the moral element of the claims-making process in the case of solidarity movements. The question is how claims are made and articulated if the claimants do not seek direct benefits but refer to moral principles. The paper answers the research question by identifying the role of morality on three levels of two Hungarian solidarity movements' praxis: goals, forms and means of mobilization; hence, the issues, the forms and frames of solidarity movements' claims making. According to the data, organizations helping refugees stand closer to voluntary organizations of political altruism than to the politically motivated solidarity movements. The data also demonstrate that established solidarity movements use a medley of policy reasoning and morally justified action. New, emerging solidarity movements can rely on morality claims when they wish to supplement their lack of expertise or resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on to develop the counterargument which questions error theorists' ability to defend their claim. It mentions that the moral error theorists can help themselves to the same semantic repertoire as other representationalists; and also highlights modifying mainstream deontic semantics.

Sociology has an ambivalent relationship with advocacy research because the benefits of participation and engagement must be balanced with concerns about bias. The current study uses 10 recent research reports on homophobia in British educational settings, written and funded by campaigning charities, as a case study of contemporary advocacy research. Presenting a sociological analysis of these documents and adopting a social problems approach, claims-making processes in the reports are documented and significant methodological and analytical flaws are identified. Instead of objective research, these reports are campaigning documents that seek to gain media coverage and influence policy. Implications for how the reports should be used as resources for research and social policy are examined, and a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to engaging with advocacy research is called for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Forum piece, I propose an alternative conceptual model, one that replaces the crisis event with the claim of urgency made by a leader as the focal unit of analysis. The proposed crisis‐as‐claim model insists that no claim of urgency is legitimate per se. From the perspective of the researcher, the crisis‐asclaim model reverses cause‐and effect from the event to the claim as independent variable. Finally, the crisis‐as‐claim model elides the consideration of heroic leadership so common in the crisis‐as‐event model, positioning instead leaders as claims makers always intent on advancing interests and enhancing power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on recent sociological debates about the explanatory importance of claims-making contexts and the continuing challenges associated with subjectivism and objectivism in social problems research. The sociology of knowledge is used to illustrate how the contextual compromise that has sustained social problems theory and method for at least two decades is based on a number of erroneous assumptions about subjectivity and objectivity in the tradition of phenomenological analysis. To strengthen recent discussions about the contextual dimensions of claims-making activities and framing techniques, the article critically assesses the curious neglect and continuing misrepresentation of the sociology of knowledge in constructionist analyses of social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of negative and positive framing of ad claims on consumers' choices and attitudes. Propositions about how the extent of processing before choice affects the relative impact of claims-related versus advertising tactics-related cognitions are tested in three experiments. Findings suggest that when processing is limited, claims-related cognitions have a greater impact on choice, which results in the sponsoring brand being chosen more often when the ad claims are negatively framed than when they are positively framed. When respondents engage in more extensive processing before choice, tactics-related cognitions become more accessible and, if perceived to be unfair, result in an attenuation of the advantage of negative framing over positive framing. A different pattern of results is obtained when one examines brand attitudes rather than brand choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 1994, the New Zealand government announced an ambitious plan to settle Māori historical grievances relating to breaches of the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Treaty of Waitangi, signed between Māori and the British Crown in 1840. Why did the Crown choose to settle Māori historical treaty claims in the early 1990s, and what did it hope to achieve by settling Māori grievances? This article explores Crown motivations for settling Māori historical treaty claims, focusing on the period from August 1992 to November 1994 identified as crucial to the development of the Crown's treaty claims settlement policy, but which has received scant attention. It concludes that while the Crown publicly offered a series of moral, legal, social and political principles to explain its motivations and objectives in settling treaty claims, the Crown's primary motivation was to divert Māori away from their legal rights, to contain the Crown's fiscal liabilities, to maintain the acceptability of treaty claims settlements to the non‐Māori public, and to "wind back" Māori rights and Crown obligations embedded in legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to produce an analysis of the politicization of the citizens after Spain's Indignados movement from a citizenship framework. The article suggests that claiming the right to the city involves more than issues of access to urban amenities: it is also about claiming the right to participate in the formation and transformation of the city and the right to appropriate the city center. This positions these rights within the larger issue of citizenship by defining it as a collective practice rather than a statesanctioned status. Our analysis is based on the empirical evidence derived from the semi-structured interviews, politicians' speeches, information based on media resources and official websites, and participant observation during three months of fieldwork in Barcelona in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationality swapping in sports is commonly assumed to be a rapidly expanding practice that is indicative of the marketization of citizenship. Sports are said to have become wholesale markets in which talent is being traded for citizenship. In this article, we seek to empirically explore such claims by analysing 167 athletes who have competed for two different countries in the Summer Olympic Games. It seems that most switches occurred after the 1990s. Then, following a citizenship as a claims-making approach, we introduce the work of Bourdieu so as to connect citizenship as both legal status and practice with normative claims. The analysis reveals that the practice of nationality switching is shaped by structural conditions of the Olympic field. First, a complex realm of citizenship laws and regulations produces conditions under which athletes make legitimate claims to citizenship. Second, through a mechanism of reverberative causation, prior migrations are often echoed in contemporary nationality swapping . Only a limited number of athletes acquired citizenship via the explicit market principle we call jus talenti. Claiming that instrumental nationality swapping is indicative of the marketization of citizenship obscures the complex interplay between structures of and practices within the Olympic field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the rights claims-making that young people engaged in during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum when the right to vote was extended to 16- and 17-year-olds for the first time in the UK. Understanding citizenship and rights claims-making as performative, we draw on the novel idea of 'living rights' to explore how young people 'shape what these rights are - and become - in the social world'. They are coexistent and situated within the everyday lives of young people, and transcend the traditional idea that rights are merely those that are enshrined in domestic and/or international law. We explore the complex and contested nature of rights claims that were made by young people as 'active citizens' in the lead up to the referendum to illustrate how the rights claims-making by young people is bound up with the performativity of citizenship that entails identity construction, political subjectivity (that challenges adultcentric approaches) and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: This article analyses the evolving politics of claims making in relation to women workers in the global South. It asks what claims are being made and by whom, who these claims are addressed to and what strategies are being employed to press these claims. It distinguishes between women working for global markets and those working for domestic markets in order to identify possible differences in constraints, priorities and opportunities underlying these strategies. It also distinguishes between the different kinds of organizations involved in making claims: organizations of women workers, organizations working with women workers and organizations working on behalf of women workers. The article is one of several papers forming a cluster on feminist mobilizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: More than two decades after the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, gender equality policies have not delivered in the ways envisaged. This special cluster of articles seeks to understand why. Women's mobilization and feminist activism was central to the Beijing process and the advocacy that followed, yet their influence on policy processes seems constrained in the current context of global political and economic changes. The articles in this cluster explore the negotiations between different actors, institutions and discourses — and the tensions and contradictions therein — as explanations for why certain domains of women's rights remain at the margins of political agendas and others receive more attention. Specifically, why have women's labour rights and the demands of the unpaid care economy failed to gain policy traction? The articles point to the importance of political practice, which includes the ‘framing’ of policy demands as compelling narratives, engagement with state entities and the forming and managing of alliances. There are trade‐offs inherent in each of these elements, for example, between transformative gender equality objectives and the pragmatic impulse to frame claims in less politically and socially threatening ways. Further, in a context of increasing globalization, mobilization is required at multiple levels — from the local to the transnational. The articles thus seek to deepen our understanding of how policy change for women's rights occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the mixed reactions to U.S. President Donald Trump's first Asia tour. Trump's agenda was perceived by many as narrow, transactional, self-serving and unsupportive of multilateralism that pushed a robust U.S. policy toward a bustling region. Regional analysts argued Trump's claim of tremendous success of his 12-day five country tour.

This study examines whether the number of citizens fatally shot by police in the United States has changed significantly since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Using longitudinal data compiled by killedbypolice.net, we use an interrupted time-series design to test the effect of events in Ferguson on fatal shootings by police. Our analyses reveal that the number of citizens killed by police is temporally unstable, exhibiting random short-term fluctuations that are often misinterpreted as evidence of substantively meaningful trends. However, after testing a variety of model specifications, we find no evidence that the number of fatal police shootings either increased or decreased post-Ferguson. Claims to the contrary are based on weak analyses of short-term trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we articulate and diagnose a previously unrecognized problem for theories of entitlement, what we call the Claims Conundrum. It applies to all entitlements that are originally generated by some claim-generating action, such as laboring, promising, or contract-signing. The Conundrum is spurred by the very plausible thought that a later claim to the object to which one is entitled is a function of whether that original claim-generating action is attributable to one. This is further assumed to depend on one's being identical to the person who performed the claim-generating action. But the right theory of personal identity for grounding these later claims proves quite elusive. In demonstrating both the Claims Conundrum and diagnosing its source, we begin with its (previously unobserved) instantiation in John Locke's theories of personal identity and initial acquisition, and then we gradually expand its net to include both Lockean and non-Lockean theories of both, moving ultimately to show that this is a problem for most entitlements generally. We then diagnose the source of the trouble, showing that a basic assumption about the link between attributability and identity that most people take to be obvious is in fact false, clearing a path for future investigation into this overlooked but serious problem's resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I advance a conceptual approach to citizenship as membership through claims-making. In this approach, citizenship is a relational process of making membership claims on polities, people and institutions, claims recognized or rejected within particular normative understandings of citizenship. Such a conceptual shift moves scholarship beyond typologizing—enumerating how citizenship is (or is not) about status, rights, participation and identity—to identifying the mechanisms through which claims on citizenship have power. This framework requires a relational approach and attention to dynamics of recognition within contexts of structured agency. Immigrants and their children can make claims to modify the normative content of citizenship, affect recognition evaluations and change the allocation of status and rights. But they are also constrained by legal structures, a society’s institutional practices, and prevailing public perceptions. Citizenship as claims-making may require a reassessment of boundary approaches and a turn to metaphors of positionality, as well as more serious commitment to mixed-methods research. The stakes of understanding citizenship’s power, as practice and status, are especially high right now. Yet based on existing scholarship, it is not entirely clear how much citizenship matters, in what ways, for whom, or why. This is the challenge for future scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to expand the agenda setting theory and its later ramifications, by complementing them with the hypothesis of the articulation function of mass-media. Defined as the capacity of the media to offer people the words and expressions associated with defending specific points of view, the articulation function suggests a new ramification of the agenda setting theory, namely the key words level of agenda setting. Building on the third-level assumption about the transfer of issues and attributes from the media to people's agenda in bundles, we argue that each issue is in fact transferred together with a set of "key words", corresponding to the additional sub-topics related to the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Security provides survivor benefits to lower-earning spouses of deceased workers entitled to a retirement benefit. The value of the survivor benefit depends on a number of factors including the deceased worker's claim age. We use the Health and Retirement Study and a discrete time hazard model to analyze how the claim age of married men influences the likelihood that their spouse will enter poverty in widowhood. We find that delayed claiming is associated with reduction in a widow's poverty risk. The magnitude of this relationship varies significantly with the claim age, Social Security dependence, and survivor benefit dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary processes of citizenship, parents and other caregivers often must make claims to the state on behalf of children with disabilities. In this article, we draw from data on the Omnibus Autism Proceedings ( OAP), which were a series of hearings in 2007 and 2008 in which parents of children with autism attempted to receive compensation from a federal program for vaccine injury. During these hearings, parents and their attorneys obfuscated the children's subjectivity and instead showcased the children's physical suffering in order to claim that their children had suffered a legitimate injury from vaccines that warranted compensation. We develop the concept of custodial citizenship to account for the process by which a legible rights-bearing subject appropriates the bodily suffering of the injured party in order to gain citizenship rights on behalf of that individual. In doing so, we trace the slippages of harm that occur in the lived experience of disability among family members and caregivers, in contrast to the individualizing rights-granting framework of the court system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the material dimensions of ethnic identity claims by Japanese-Filipino children in the Philippines and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) advocating on their behalf. Most Japanese-Filipino clients of NGOs in the Philippines were raised by their Filipino families with little knowledge of their Japanese fathers and little or no lived experience of Japan. Although these children and young adults are often called “multi-cultural” by NGO workers, they frequently grow up with no connection to Japan other than an awareness of their Japanese parentage and Japanese cultural products equally accessible to most Filipinos. I argue that filiation can be leveraged to gain access to resources not only through the legal implications that are provided by biological relationships, but also through symbolically salient claims for belonging to a nation or people by virtue of descent. This consanguineal capital should primarily be understood in politically symbolic terms, mobilized in processes of claims-making and based on notions of “blood” and belonging and their frequent conflation with ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses in the legal mobilization and juridification of immigration law and policies. Topics inlude the role of the courts in governing asylum and immigration claims, function of the administrative courts in managing immigration case flows in Germany, judicialization of politics, and understanding of the asylum seeking or immigration.

Newspaper data are popular in Comparative Migration Studies as they allow diachronic and cross-national comparison and are relatively easy and inexpensive to acquire. Critics, however, warn that newspaper data are hampered by selection, description and researcher bias. This article argues that research drawing on newspaper data can be improved by employing mixed methods to confirm and complement data and to analyze findings from different research paradigms. To demonstrate this claim, I ethnographically re-analyze part of the dataset of the Mobilisation on Ethnic Relations, Citizenship and Immigration (MERCI) project. I chose MERCI as publications based on its data, which I am well acquainted with, have inspired numerous researchers and European comparative research projects to pursue newspaper content analysis. This article shows how an ethnographic approach can address description bias and researcher unreliability, and reveal selection bias. It offers concrete suggestions for incorporating political ethnography into newspaper analysis. In doing so it advocates a new path for empirical research in Comparative Migration Studies, one that bridges the qualitative-quantitative divide. The conclusion encourages researchers on both sides of the quantitative-qualitative spectrum to reconsider habitual and safe research paradigms and move towards the middle to improve the quality of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]