2026 Dataset of Local Governance Actors’ Perceptions of Migrant Integration Outcomes

Abstract: The dataset provides data derived from an elite survey with local governance actors conducted by the Whole-COMM project and specifically those data that are used for the paper “Success or Failure? How Political Context Shapes Local Governance Actors’ Assessments of Migrant Integration Outcomes”. The dataset comprises information on 321 respondents across 36 Western European municipalities (anonymised as according to the ethical protocol of the project).

Primary Researchers, Institution: 
Bassoli, Matteo - 0000-0003-3601-9099 (CISR, SPGI, Università degli Studi di Padova); 
Pettrachin, Andrea - 0000-0001-7238-9631 (SPGI, Università degli Studi di Padova);
Caponio, Tiziana - 0000-0003-1067-0318 (Università di Torino and Collegio Carlo Alberto)

Supporting institution
This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004714 (‘Whole-COMM’ Project). This research received ethics clearance by the Ethics Committee of the Collegio Carlo Alberto (Ethics Review Report 1, D9.3).

Publication year: 2026
Date of Data Collection: Dec 2021- Feb 2022
Geographic coverage: Italy, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands
Population: 36 localities (with 5,000-200,000 inhabitants)
Subject area: Political Science, Political sociology
Codebook: 21/08/2026

Content
Code2: Interviewee code. 
Country: Country in which the respondent’s locality is located. 
Locality: Municipality/locality in which the respondent operates. 
Delta_employment: Difference between the employment rate of native-born citizens and the employment rate of non-EU migrants, measured at the provincial or county level (NUTS2). 
Size: Population size of the locality, measured as the population officially registered by the national statistical institute. 
Lastelection21_RR: Share of votes obtained by radical right parties (RRPs – as defined by the PopuList 2023) in the locality at the last national election. 
Tradition_RR: Historical strength of radical right parties (RRPs) in the locality, measured as the average share of votes obtained by RRPs in national elections held in the locality between 2006 and 2021. 
Cit14: Share of residents who were citizens of a foreign country in 2014. 
COB14: Share of residents born in a non-EU country in 2014. 
Cit19: Share of residents who were citizens of a foreign country in 2019. 
COB19: Share of residents born in a non-EU country in 2019. 
UN19: Unemployment rate in the locality in 2019. 
Actortype3: Type of actor/respondent, distinguishing between elected policymakers (left-wing), elected policymakers (right-wing), bureaucrats/local officials, non-public service providers, civil society actors, and private-sector actors. 
Sector: Policy sector in which the respondent operates, including employment, asylum-seekers’ reception, housing, social services, education, migrant integration, and other sectors. 
Specialist: Degree of respondent specialisation in migrant integration, distinguishing actors working specifically on migrant integration from those working on migrant integration as part of a broader mandate. 
Gender: Gender of the respondent. 
Age2: Age of the respondent. 
Perc_integration: Respondent’s perception of the integration outcomes of migrants who arrived after 2014 in their locality, measured on a 1–5 scale from 1 (= very unsuccessful) to 5 (= very successful). 
Frame_ECONOMIC: Indicator of whether the respondent conceptualises migrant integration primarily in economic terms, based on their response to the question about how they define migrant integration in their daily work. 
Responsibilityframe: Respondent’s conceptualisation of who is responsible for migrant integration, distinguishing between respondents who identify migrants only as responsible and those who identify migrants together with other actors (e.g. Public institutions, the local population, or other community actors). 
RESP_migrantsonly: Binary indicator identifying respondents who consider migrant integration to be the responsibility of migrants only. 
Logrrshare: Logarithmic transformation of the percentage of seats held by radical right parties (rrps), as defined by the Popu-List (2023), in the municipal legislative body. 
Ideology: Political orientation of the respondent, based on party affiliation for elected policymakers and, for non-public actors, on the ideological mission of the organisation they represent. 
Ideologynonpublic: Political orientation of respondents representing non-public organisations, distinguishing organisations classified as progressive from those without a publicly declared ideological position.

Sources
Locality-level data
Official data retrieved from the website of national statistical offices or other governmental websites.
Individual-level data
Data collected by the “Whole-COMM” research group

Methodology
Sampling frame
This is described in depth in Pettrachin et al. 2026: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03003930.2024.2401916
 
Interviewee identification
This is described in depth in Pettrachin et al. 2026: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03003930.2024.2401916

References
Andrea Pettrachin, Tiziana Caponio & Camilla Borgna (2026) Who is responsible for migrant integration? Contextual political drivers of governance actors’ responsibility frames in small and medium European localities, Local Government Studies, 52:3, 490-512, DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2024.2401916

Acknowledgements: Data used in this paper have been collected by researchers working in the Whole-COMM Consortium, including: Dr Irene Ponzo, Dr Eleonora Milazzo, Dr Orlando De Gregorio, Dr Reinhard Schweitzer, Dr Elina Jonitz, Louise Hantson, Hakan Kilic, Dr Isabella Skrivanek, Prof. Birgit Glorius, Dr Friederike Enssle-Reinhardt, Dr Hanne Schneider and Dr Mans Lundstedt.