The Logic of Fear: Populism and Media Coverage of Immigrant Crimes

Mathieu Couttenier, Sophie Hatte, Mathias Thoenig and Stephanos Vlachos

Abstract: We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 "minaret ban" referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator's nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%).

Keywords: Media; Violent crime; Immigration; Vote; Populism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur, nep-law, nep-pol and nep-soc
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02095658v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02095658v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Logic of Fear - Populism and Media Coverage of Immigrant Crimes (2019)
Working Paper: The Logic of Fear: Populism and Media Coverage of Immigrant Crimes (2019)
Working Paper: The Logic of Fear - Populism and the Media Coverage of Immigrant Crimes (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-02095658

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().