Medias framställning av fenomenet icke-medborgare i Sverige innan valet 2022. En kvalitativ innehållsanalys av representationer av icke-medborgare och sociala problem

Sammanfattning: News reports about people being expelled from Sweden, even though they have lived in the country for several years, raise questions such as when a person can be seen as a member of the Swedish community. Even though they in some ways can be seen as a part of the community and being integrated, there seems to be more than just fulfilling some of the criteria that are often talked about in regard to being integrated. This aforementioned criterion includes working, studying, and paying taxes. The aim of this study was therefore to explore how non-citizens are being portrayed in the public debate and what kinds of social problems are being associated with them. By non-citizens, we, in this study, mean individuals who in national, ethnic, and cultural regard can be seen as “the others”. This is then according to an understanding that there are mechanisms that lead to individuals being seen as included or excluded in the national community. The method chosen for this study is a qualitative content analysis where we have studied editorials from four newspapers published during the three months before the Swedish election. In analyzing our results, we have used Carol Bacchi's theory “What’s the problem represented to be?”. This has given us tools to reach an understanding of how problems are being represented, underlying assumptions behind these representations, silences in the representations, and which effects are being produced by them. This study found that there is a difference between how non-citizens are portrayed in different newspapers, which we can see derives from their different ideological belongings. What the different representations have in common is that an understanding of non-citizens as something problematic can be seen and that they continuously are being associated with some kind of social problem. The big difference can be seen in who is being held responsible for these problems, either the individuals or the lack of political or societal actions. We have in this study attempted to highlight the importance of critically reviewing problem representations and how they affect our understanding of different phenomena.