From ‘welfare queens’ to remigration – ERUA research fellow Laura Padrón Brito investigates political dog-whistling

Laura, why did you apply for the grant within the ERUA Visiting Program for Early Career Researchers?

I thought that a monthly research stay would be the perfect opportunity to get to know one of the ERUA universities and also see how ERUA works here. The best part is getting in contact with other people that may be interested in the same topics as I am so that they may give me some insights into my research that I may not have seen before. I normally receive feedback from my supervisor and my own colleagues, but having someone read your work from an outside perspective gives you a wider spectrum of ideas to work with and to help you tackle problems that other people may not have seen before.

What do you want to focus on while you are here at Viadrina?

My specific idea for this month is to really push forward my analysis part of my thesis. And I have had the chance to partake in the ERUA Research Week and made some connections with people from other universities. I also take part in seminars of my host Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė and Prof. Dr. Václav Štětka from the European New School of Digital Studies.
 

Please tell me more about your research on dog whistles. What exactly is a dog whistle?

A dog whistle is a specific linguistic resource which for the most part political actors use to convey different messages using the same words. That means within the same utterance I can convey different meanings depending on who is listening to that same sentence. It has to do with group culture and the shared common knowledge that these groups have. It's a metaphor of literal whistles that you can blow and they emit a very high frequency sound that only some animals can hear. So that specific image has been adapted into linguistics to talk about a message that some can hear and some can't.
 

Can you give me an example of a dog whistle?

There's a very well-known phrase that was used in the USA especially during Ronald Reagan's campaign in the 1970s, 1980s which is the “welfare queen”. This term was used by Reagan to talk about African-American women without actually saying African-American women. There was this conception that African-American people were the ones that were not only using the welfare system, but abusing it, at the expense of “hard working American people” who payed their bills and their taxes. So he didn't explicitly mention race but because he knew that people would recognise these welfare queens as African-American women he used this term to avoid any conflicting message or any message that could be interpreted at that time as racist.
 

What exactly are you looking at in your research?

 I'm specifically looking at how politicians across different European countries use dog whistles in their rhetoric. I look at Spain, the United Kingdom and Germany between 2020 and 2024. The available research on dog whistles mainly focuses on the United States, we do not have a lot of studies that focus on the practise of dog whistles in Europe. So, I was interested in seeing whether that practise had had any impact on European politics and if politicians had picked up on it and had begun to use it. 

We have some terms that have already been coined in the literature as dog whistles and I'm trying to find any instances of these. Additionally, I try to find newer instances of dog whistles which has proven to be the most difficult part because, although dog whistles follow specific criteria, it's very difficult to assess whether certain instances are intentional or not when you don't have the complete access to the common knowledge of the groups that they may be secretly addressing. You may know their ideological positioning, but you don't know other variables that may come into play. 

At first, I thought that I was going to find specific instances of dog whistles for specific cultures because a dog whistle can be a very culturally coded thing. But to my surprise, so far, I have found that actually some of them have permeated into all of the analysed countries.
 

Is there a specific example that shows that?

For example, the term re-migration, which has been very extensively used here in Germany. We are now beginning to see some instances of that specific term in Spain, for example. Even though they are not happening at the same time, we can still see that a specific party has adapted this rhetoric from a German party, which is closely ideologically aligned. 

Re-migration was originally a term from sociology, which alluded to people that return to their country of origin by their own choice. This term has been picked specifically to talk about something that has nothing to do with the voluntary return to your country, but it has turned into an implicit reference to enforced deportation. So instead of talking about massive deportation, which is undemocratic, or Rückführung, which already alludes to forceful expelling of migrants that have exhausted the time to leave the country of their own volition, I use this new term to signal that I'm part of a specific group that most likely share my ideas of massive deportation, and if I see other people using this term to talk about the same thing, I know that these people are probably ideologically aligned with me.
 

How does a dog-whistle like that come up and how long does it work?

There is a very recent study, which has traced the prototypical life cycle of a dog whistle. It begins being a term that is used by very few people, and people that are outside of that bubble are not going to be able to recognise it. But as more and more people begin to use that term, it becomes known to the broader public, and it reaches a moment where the utility of that dog whistle begins to decrease. You can still use it, but it's not as effective. 

But there is still an advantage in using this specific term, because you can always rely onplausible deniability, which is basically the ability to reject what you have said.
 

What is the main use of a dog whistle?

There can be identifying dog whistles and enriching dog whistles. Identifying dog whistles are the ones that have merely an identifying purpose. I'm using this specific term so that you know that I'm aligned with you. But it doesn't necessarily have to have a hidden meaning. The enriching dog whistles also serve as identifying dog whistles, but with the ability to portray various different messages to various audiences.

Are they part of normal politics? Or in your view, are they also a danger to democratic communication?

There's actually a scholarly debate about whether dog whistles are a threat to democracy or rather a legitimate rhetorical resource. Me personally, I would say that it does reduce the trustworthiness of politicians, because they are not being fully transparent with their intentions, and they are using language purposefully to deceit a big part of the population and to convey undemocratic values without explicitly saying so. I think that we should be careful about not only what we hear but also what we do not hear.
 

Who uses dog whistles most?

It seems to be a strategy that is mostly used by right and far-right parties because they are the most interested in conveying this type of undemocratic values or that are against our idea of social well-being. But there are also brands using dog whistles as a way to convey social messaging without triggering other groups, and they do not necessarily carry pernicious meanings. For example, the car brand Subaru did a campaign where the slogan was “Get Out and Stay Out”, which a lot of people interpreted as “Get Out of the Closet and Stay Out of the Closet”. They were implicitly conveying their support for the LGBTQ+ community without triggering other conservative buyers of their brand.
 

Comparing the times of Reagan’s welfare queens and todays re-migration – does social media change a lot regarding dog-whistles?

I would say so because we have very easy access to social media and posts are very easy to spread. We can all be victims of dog whistles. There is also no mediation between a journalist and a politician. There is a conscious decision by the politician to use that specific words and no one is going to rephrase that. They are fully in control of what they say.
 

And in social media it sometimes is about symbols, not words. Can they also be used as dog whistles?

Indeed, they can. Specifically, the case of the watermelon for Palestine, it was used as a dog whistle. There were social media platforms that were eliminating content related to Palestine. If you were very specific with your wording, your post could be potentially flagged and banned by Instagram or X (formerly Twitter). So, people started to use the watermelon emoji because it resembled the colours of the Palestinian flag. This way they could talk about the topic without being overtly explicit. But if you knew the context, you could have made that connection. This specific dog whistle didn't have an undemocratic hidden message. But it was used as a mechanism to avoid algorithmic detection and to avoid censorship.