Intractable policy controversies like migrant integration often involve a high level of politicization. This paper looks specifically at how and why politicization changes research–policy dialogues, involving both the structure of these dialogues and how they affect policy-making and knowledge production. Migrant integration policy (in five EU countries and at EU level) is taken as a case study. Bringing together theories on knowledge utilization, knowledge production and the structure of research–policy relations (dialogue structures), our analysis shows that a process of ‘politicization of science’ goes hand in hand with a process of ‘scientification of politics’. Research–policy dialogues continue in the context of politicization, but in a fundamentally different way. Different sorts of institutional dialogues between research and policy emerge that do justice to political primacy, knowledge utilization becomes more symbolic but not less important, and knowledge production tends to become more fragmented in the context of politicization.
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