Follow the media? News environment and public concern about immigration

Abstract

Immigration is a hot topic in Europe, but research on the media effects on public attention to immigration remains limited. We examine how media coverage affects the degree of importance attached to immigration in seven Western European Union member states. Data come from an extensive analysis of claims in printed newspapers, and the Eurobarometer (2002-2009). The continuous sample of news coverage is aggregated into a biannual panel, and we relate these data to citizens' perceptions of the most important issues in their country 6 months later (lagged). The public consider immigration more important than other policy-related issues when there is an increase in the volume of news and more political claims on the topic in the media. The media environment appears to be an exogenous actor that can have agenda-setting effects on public concern about immigration. Our results highlight limitations of both the 'policy-gap' thesis and thermostatic models of policy making.

Available at: https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1475-6765.12683

Full text

European Journal of Political Research rr
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, 2024 1
doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12683
Follow the media? News environment and public concern about immigration
JOÃO CARVALHO,1MARIANA CARMO DUARTE2& DIDIER RUEDIN3
1Centro de Investigação e Estudos em Sociologia, ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal;
2Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal; 3Swiss Forum for Migration and Population
Studies, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Abstract. Immigration is a hot topic in Europe, but research on the media effects on public attention to immigration
remains limited. We examine how media coverage affects the degree of importance attached to immigration in seven
Western European Union member states. Data come from an extensive analysis of claims in printed newspapers, and
the Eurobarometer (2002–2009). The continuous sample of news coverage is aggregated into a biannual panel, and
we relate these data to citizens’ perceptions of the most important issues in their country 6 months later (lagged). The
public consider immigration more important than other policy-related issues when there is an increase in the volume
of news and more political claims on the topic in the media. The media environment appears to be an exogenous
actor that can have agenda-setting effects on public concern about immigration. Our results highlight limitations of
both the ‘policy-gap’ thesis and thermostatic models of policy making.
Keywords: immigration; media; public concern; agenda-setting; most important issue; policy-gaps
Introduction
Immigration is a hot topic across Western democracies and a major driver behind the emergence
of a new cultural cleavage in the 2010s (Dalton, 2018; Green-Pedersen & Otjes, 2019;Norris&
Inglehart, 2019). Nonetheless, the comparative and empirical study of media effects on the degree
of importance associated with immigration as a policy issue stays limited1and the results are
conflicting (Bleich et al., 2015;Eberletal.,2018; Lecheler et al., 2019). For instance, regarding
the intense attention to immigration around the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, Dennison and
Geddes (2019, p.107) argued that ‘it would be dubious, […], to ascribe such strong causal effects
to negative media coverage’. More generally, the salience of immigration is highlighted by work
on the gap between policy objectives and the subsequent outcome of immigration control (often
interpreted as a lack of government control; Hadj Abdou et al., 2022; Hollifield et al., 2014).
Remarkably, existing accounts of the politicisation of immigration also exclude the media as a
potential explanation for intense public attention to this topic, focusing almost exclusively on the
agency of political parties (Grande et al., 2019; Hutter & Kriesi, 2021).
By contrast, research on political communication highlights the importance of the media in
shaping public opinion despite the strong variations found in its development (Harteveld et al.,
2018; Tesler & Zaller, 2017; Vestergaard, 2020). Within this context, we focus on agenda-setting
effects on the importance attached to immigration as an issue: how patterns of news reporting
about immigration (volume of news and political claims) and its content (tone of political claims)
are associated with changes across the importance attached to immigration in comparison to other
policy-related issues in seven Western European Union (EU) member states between 2002 and
2009. To reach this objective, we evaluate the indirect effects of the news environment because
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2JOÃO CARVALHO, MARIANA CARMO DUARTE & DIDIER RUEDIN
we cannot disentangle direct media exposure from the overall information environment. Thereby,
we assume that individuals not directly exposed to media content are indirectly influenced by
interpersonal communication as citizens are embedded in their social settings (Hopmann et al.,
2010).
Drawing on the extensive media analysis by Van der Brug et al. (2015), we use a continuous
sample of claims-making derived from quality newspapers and tabloids to create a comparative
dataset to assess agenda setting effects. Broadly, a political claim describes any purposive political
demand, proposal or comment made by or in the name of a collective group in the national public
sphere that affects the interests of the claimant or another group (Koopmans & Statham, 2010).
The tone of political claims was distinguished between positive/expansive (open to immigration
flows, support multiculturalism) and negative/restrictive claims (expressing opposition to inflows
or monocultural positions). The outcome variable is the electorate’s ranking of immigration among
the two most important issues (MII) at the national level, as measured by Eurobarometer surveys.
Hence, our study focuses on the judgements of the national importance of a particular policy issue
rather than on the personal importance attached to immigration. An important issue refers to an
issue that citizens care about a lot at a particular time, and higher salience means citizens are more
cognitively and behaviourally engaged with a particular issue (Jennings & Wlezien, 2011; Miller
et al., 2016).
Our contributions to the literature in terms of research design are threefold. First, we adopt a
consistent comparative dimension by focusing on seven Western EU member-states while cross-
national evaluations of media effects on issue salience using survey data are still scarce or limited
to case studies (Eberl et al., 2018; Lecheler et al., 2019). Second, we propose systematic and
comparative analyses of media content to capture the effects on issue salience from a longitudinal
perspective rather than focusing on a brief period or specific exogenous events, like the 2015
‘refugee crisis’ or elections (Dunaway et al., 2010; Harteveld et al., 2018). In contrast to short-
term coverage of the news (Cinalli et al., 2021; Strömbäck et al., 2021), we do not only include
periods in which migration is a priori likely to be salient. Third, our investigation focuses on the
media effects of the importance the public attach to immigration rather than on public attitudes or
policy preferences, which is an area of analysis still in its infancy (Hopkins et al., 2019;Kustov
et al., 2021).
Our research shows significant agenda-setting effects of the media environment on public
concern about immigration at the cross-national level. We find substantial and statistically
significant agenda-setting effects regarding the transmission of object salience, but not regarding
attribute salience, highlighting a distinction overlooked in most existing work. Media effects on the
importance associated with immigration in Europe during the 2000s appear substantial and seem
to show greater relevance than environmental factors, like gross domestic product (GDP) growth
or changes in the size of the foreign population. We show that the salience of immigration in
printed news was strongly associated with variations in the ranking of immigration as an important
issue in the seven selected countries. Our results suggest that the media environment should be
considered as an independent variable behind the variance on public concern about immigration.
Looking beyond the public, our results contain important repercussions at the theoretical level,
particularly on research related to the politicisation of immigration and interparty competition
on this topic. Secondly, our analysis presents a challenge to basic assumptions of the policy gap
thesis and thermostatic models of policymaking that support contemporary analysis of immigration
policy.
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NEWS ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC CONCERN ABOUT IMMIGRATION 3
Media effects on public opinion
The scope of research on the impact of the media on public attitudes or policy preferences towards
immigration largely exceeds studies focusing on the public salience of the issue. Comparative
research in the Netherlands and Denmark during the 2000s showed that media salience was the
only relevant contextual effect on negative public attitudes in Denmark, whilst immigrant inflow
and most media characteristics influenced attitudes towards immigrants in the Netherlands (Van
Klingeren et al., 2015). A study of the influence of the news about the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ on
public attitudes towards the EU and national institutions concluded that the number of asylum
requests and the media coverage had a positive effect on levels of Euroscepticism (Harteveld
et al., 2018). The authors suggest that these effects are dependent on citizens’ prior attitudes or
predispositions: the effects are stronger for right-leaning citizens and individuals who are more
negatively predisposed towards immigration.
Drawing on data from the REMINDER project, Eberl and Meltzer (2021) looked at the
relationship between media texts between 2013 and 2016 with the respondents’ media use in six
European countries. They found that changes in the negative and positive sentiments in the media
sources used by the respondents can affect their attitudes, whilst the level of political sophistication
of the audience is an important moderator of this relationship. The analysis of media effects on
citizens’ overestimation of the share of the foreign-born population in their country shows that the
increase of media coverage of migration in the respondents’ media diets reduced these estimates,
while frequent use of social media and television increased innumeracy (Meltzer & Schemer,
2021). In this context, the different frames included in the news outlets can lead to different
reactions in the public, suggesting that communication effects can vary according to the media
format (Theorin, 2021).
By contrast, research investigating media effects on public concern about immigration is
limited. Studies in the United States of America suggest that an increase in media coverage of
immigration is followed by an increase in public concern about this issue (Dunaway et al., 2010).
Border states see more news about immigration than non-border states, implying greater concern
about the topic. Resident voters in border states are more likely to rank immigration as the country’s
most important problem (Dunaway et al., 2010). Communication factors appear to have relevant
effects on public concern. Research conducted in Europe from 2002 to 2016 interpreted the policy
preferences and salience of immigration as a potential thermostat of public opinion (Hatton, 2021).
This study reported strong fluctuations in the importance of immigration in public opinion across
countries, which appears to be related to short-term environmental factors rather than with media
coverage (Hatton, 2021). In short, the study of media effects on public concern about immigration
is still scarce and reveals contradictory results.
Combining migration studies and agenda setting
We explore the theory of agenda setting to understand the cross-national variation of public concern
about immigration. Agenda setting refers to the process of mutual influence between the media
and the audience’s perceptions of the issues of the day (Eberl et al., 2018; McCombs, 2014). News
coverage by mainstream media has an important influence on voters’ assessment of the relevance
and importance of social phenomena, especially on the urgency of solving them (Roessler, 2007).
In the present case, when the mass media highlight immigration as newsworthy and increase its
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4JOÃO CARVALHO, MARIANA CARMO DUARTE & DIDIER RUEDIN
visibility, the audience will be more likely to consider this topic a relevant issue (Damstra et al.,
2021; Walgrave & van Aelst, 2006). Unlike other topics like the economy, immigration is a non-
obtrusive social phenomenon, and most people only have indirect experience of this issue (Gelman
& Margalit, 2021; McLaren et al., 2018). As personal experience is limited, this trend reinforces
the media’s priming effect on the electorate on this issue (McLaren et al., 2018).Themediaare
necessary to inform the public, but this reliance on the media can lead to strong fluctuations in
the importance attached to immigration in relation to other obtrusive political topics (McCombs,
2014).
Media effects are likely to affect voters, especially if we think of them as rationally ignorant
about politics (Druckman, 2014; Kustov et al., 2021). This is particularly the case with complex
issues like immigration, which can be difficult even for trained political scientists and experts to
fully understand: the diversity of types of inflows (labour, family reunification, asylum, irregular,
student, etc.), the endogenous and exogenous causal factors supporting global migration networks,
the different legal frameworks in use, as well as the distribution of costs and benefits across the host
society, pose an enormous obstacle to a full comprehension of this social phenomenon (Rosenblum
& Tichenor, 2012). Moreover, good information is rarely available (Blinder & Jeannet, 2018), and
it can be difficult to distinguish immigration policy from other public policies. Since the policy of
immigration control is the result of a complex bargaining process between different stakeholders
(Czaika & de Haas, 2013), it is also difficult to determine who is responsible for policy outcomes.
Immigration is therefore a policy area where the public must rely heavily on media information
(Lecheler et al., 2019), which happens on two levels.
The first level of agenda setting concerns the transmission of object salience – which topics
are considered important and in search of a solution – between the media and public opinion
(McCombs, 2014). Here, we explore the potential relationship between the volume, intensity of
reporting or visibility of international migration in the print media and public opinion on the
priority of immigration compared to other political topics (Harteveld et al., 2018; McLaren et al.,
2018; Van Klingeren et al., 2015; Vestergaard, 2020). In the literature, there are two dominant
approaches to capture this volume or intensity: the amount of news coverage in terms of articles
on a topic, and the level of attention to the topic within these articles (Vliegenthart, 2018), in our
case, the level of claims. Following this theoretical distinction, the first expectation suggests that:
Salience of news: An increase in the amount of news about immigration leads to an increase
in the proportion of respondents who rank immigration among the most important issues
facing their country.
The second level of agenda setting focuses on the transmission of attribute salience – the process
by which the media tell the public how to think about social phenomena by associating attributes
with objects (McCombs, 2014). This means looking at what happens within articles: While some
news articles related to immigration are purely descriptive, others also include more in-depth
analysis, reporting on the political claims by different collective actors, such as political parties
or civil society associations (Van der Brug et al., 2015; Vliegenthart, 2018). Political commentary
included in the news is conceived as a vehicle for public opinion formation, as the frames and
cues used by political actors will help citizens to define and interpret political phenomena (Cinalli
et al., 2021;Kriesi,2004). Elite opinion is reinforced by the political capital of actors and can have
more influence on public judgements of the national importance of issues than news that has been
stripped of such claims. Citizens evaluate the content and implications of a message based on its
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NEWS ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC CONCERN ABOUT IMMIGRATION 5
source and are more likely to agree when they support the politicians or social group proposing it.
The media act as gatekeepers, deciding what is newsworthy by including information and political
claims in their news, choosing which comments and voices are valuable to the public, ‘important’
or newsworthy (Bleich et al., 2015;Kriesi,2004).
Increased public exposure to commentary on immigration-related topics by political actors
can lead to consistent variation in the political importance associated with immigration across the
electorate. In this perspective, the media are interpreted as a platform for political actors to present
their political claims. Thus, the content of the news is considered more important rather than the
total number of news items (Vliegenthart, 2018), although both approaches capture salience in
some form. Individuals are more likely to care about immigration as a top priority when their
exposure to political claims on the subject is higher (Harteveld et al., 2018; Zaller, 1992). The
second expectation from our theoretical model concerns the potential effects of the volume of
political claims on public concern about immigration:
Salience of political claims: An increase in the number of political claims about immigration
leads to an increase in the proportion of respondents who rank immigration among the most
important issues facing their country.
However, analysing the volume and intensity of news coverage or the visibility of political
claims about immigration is not sufficient to explore the impact of the media on public concern
about immigration. Another strand of research on media effects distinguishes the tone of media
messages about immigration as a separate explanatory variable (Boomgaarden & Vliegenthart,
2009; Damstra et al., 2021; Van Klingeren et al., 2015). The overall emphasis on a particular
attribute of immigration may have greater influence on the salience of immigration than the news
that is not differentiated (Cinalli et al., 2021; McLaren et al., 2018). For instance, using a survey
experiment on immigration, research in the United Kingdom (UK) suggests that the language used
in the British media influences the political cognition of the electorate, although it is difficult to
assess how strong and durable such effects are outside of the lab (Blinder & Jeannet, 2018).
Competing claims have an important structuring and orienting function, providing templates,
peripheral cues and heuristics for understanding politics from different perspectives (Eberl et al.,
2018). In this case, people will receive the information and decide whether to accept the tone of
the political claims selected by journalists and editors (Eveland & Garret, 2017; Zaller, 1992). In
this respect, the influence of the media on public opinion should be directional: greater visibility
of positive claims about immigration should lead the public to care less about this topic regardless
of their predispositions (Bos et al., 2016; Vliegenthart, 2018). By contrast, an increase in negative
claims about immigration should increase the proportion of individuals who judge this issue to
be a top priority at the national level (McLaren et al., 2018). Against this background, the third
empirical expectation is:
Tone of political claims:
a) An increase in the proportion of political claims with a positive tone on immigration leads to
a decrease in the proportion of respondents who rank immigration among the most important
issues facing their country.
b) An increase in the proportion of political claims with a negative tone on immigration leads
to an increase in the proportion of respondents who rank immigration among the most
important issues facing their country.
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6JOÃO CARVALHO, MARIANA CARMO DUARTE & DIDIER RUEDIN
Data and methods
We test our argument using data from seven Western EU countries: Austria, Belgium, Ireland,
the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and the UK. This country selection follows a most-similar
systems design.2First, these countries are post-industrial OECD democracies, whose wealth
attracts inflows of migrants while the liberal character of their states disapproves hate speech
and grants protection to foreign citizens. Second, it consists of countries with relevant immigrant
populations, namely foreign populations from non-EU countries, which is a necessary condition for
intensifying media coverage of this topic (Van der Brug et al., 2015, p. 196). Third, it only includes
EU member states because they are generally subject to the integration of their immigration
policies (Boswell & Geddes, 2011). Thus, the process of Europeanisation has far-reaching effects
on national legislation of EU member states, which can influence media coverage on legislative
developments concerning immigration unlike in non-EU countries like Switzerland or Norway
(Van der Brug et al., 2015).3Last, the date of accession of the selected cases precedes the departing
point of our analysis and the enlargement processes observed in 2004, 2007 and 2013. Thereby,
the Europeanisation effects were commonly observed in the selected cases during the time of our
investigation.
Despite these important similarities, the selected countries show different patterns of public
concern about immigration (outcome variable; Figure 1).4Our analysis includes one country where
the ranking of immigration was consistently high (over 25 per cent – the UK), two countries
where it was moderate to high (12.5 to 25 per cent – Austria and Belgium), two countries
where it was moderate to low (around 12.5 per cent – Ireland and the Netherlands), one where
it was a latent issue (below 5 per cent – Portugal), and one country where it was a punctuated
phenomenon (Spain). Similarly, in most of the countries selected there was significant variation in
the importance attached to immigration at the national level. This variation is fundamental to the
assessment of media effects on the outcome variable. Indeed, the country selection also includes
countries where unexpected exogenous shocks related to immigration occurred during the selected
period, like the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, terrorist attacks in Spain and
the UK, and migrant boat arrivals in the Canary Islands in Spain (see Supporting Information,
Appendix A for additional details on the countries included in the analysis). In short, our country
selection captures the strong heterogeneity observed across Western EU member states regarding
public concern about this social phenomenon or the observation of exogenous shocks.
Public concern about immigration is measured using the MII question included in the
Eurobarometer surveys (question wording: ‘What do you think are the two most important issues
facing [OUR COUNTRY] at the moment?’). This question was first asked in 2002 and requires
respondents to select the two most important issues facing their country from a list of 14 political
issues, ranging from the economy to health and education. The MII question in the Eurobarometer
makes it possible to track changes in public opinion on the importance of immigration compared
to other political topics every 6 months (Hatton, 2021).
Media data are used to measure the predictor variables. Empirically, we draw on the extensive
content analyses by Van der Brug et al. (2015) and Carvalho and Duarte (2020) that systematically
coded news article on migration. The content analyses included a random sample of 700 days
for each country (including the two dominant language areas in Belgium) over a period of 15
years (1995–2009). For each selected country, all news articles related to immigration control and
immigrant integration were extracted from two national newspapers: a quality paper and a tabloid
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NEWS ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC CONCERN ABOUT IMMIGRATION 7
Figure 1. Public concern about immigration between 2002–2009.
Note: The solid line is the trend line (LOESS). The grey dots show the proportion of the population who consider
‘migration’ as one of the two most important issues facing their country. Source: European Commission, 2009.
(Supporting Information, Appendix B). The use of two different media sources should ensure a
consistent analysis of the amount of news coverage on immigration and a heterogenous analysis
of the political claims found in the news environment. While selection and description biases exist
in the media, they are not problematic for the present analysis because we seek to measure these
media effects – in terms of journalists’ ability to filter the political demands according to their
journalistic criteria – on public concern about immigration.
In this analysis, the predictor variables for salience are the proportion of news, and the
proportion of political claims about immigration (Supporting Information, Appendix B). Both
variables correspond to the ratio between the number of news or political claims in a country in
each semester, and the total number of news or political claims in a country during the total period
of analysis. This operationalisation captures the variation of the salience of immigration-related
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8JOÃO CARVALHO, MARIANA CARMO DUARTE & DIDIER RUEDIN
topics over time in each country (Supporting Information, Appendix C). Both the sampling
of the news and the coding of the political claims were done manually by native speakers
of the respective languages, using content analysis (see Van der Brug et al. (2015)forthe
codebook).
Regarding the tone of political claims about immigration control and immigrant integration in
the media, there are two separate predictor variables: the proportion of positive claims and the
proportion of negative claims. Similar to the salience variable, these measures consist of the ratio
between the number of positive or negative political claims and the number of claims with tone in
the country and semester. Political claims with a positive or negative tone can be found in a single
news report. In the original dataset, the tone of a political claim is classified as positive (showing
openness towards immigrants, ranked as 1 and 0.5), neutral (0), or negative (suggesting restrictive
positions, −0.5 and −1; Van der Brug et al., 2015;Supporting Information, Appendix C).5
To estimate the impact of media effects on public concern about immigration, we use panel data
analysis, because we have repeated observations over time. A panel can be generated by merging
time-series observations across a range of cross-sectional units, such as countries, political parties
or randomly sampled individuals. Here, we analyse seven Western EU member states over 15
semesters (2002–2009) yielding 105 observations. With the panel design, we can estimate variation
both between and within countries. Considering the aim of this research and the results of the
Hausman test, we assume that there is no correlation between the unique errors and the regressors
in the models. Thus, the random effect model is preferred over a fixed effect model to estimate
the impact of media effect on public concern about immigration6. Notwithstanding, fixed effects
models – which account for time-invariant omitted variables – produce comparable results to the
random effects models (Supporting Information, Appendix D). Leave-one-out analyses show that
the main results are not driven by a single case.
The outcome and predictor variables are calculated for each country-semester. The choice of
using semesterly data follows the agenda-setting literature, which shows that media effects on
the public agenda typically reflect patterns seen in the news in the preceding one or two months.
Nonetheless, agenda-setting effects are expected to be watered down in the period between 8 and
26 weeks (McCombs, 2014). We use a 24-week lag, which is the shortest lag we could use given the
outcome and predictor variables, and, thus, our analysis takes a conservative approach to finding
media effects. In the analysis, we have selected Eurobarometer waves with fieldwork 6 months
after the media data. This 6-month lag between the volume of news and political claims of the
immigration-related topic in the media on the one hand, and with public concern about immigration
on the other, allows testing the hypothesis that the former affects the latter. This strategy allows
us to control for the potential problem of reverse causality and is consistent with the literature
suggesting that citizens are poorly informed about immigration (Blinder & Jeannet, 2018). In the
models, we use control variables to account for factors that may influence both the variation of
the outcome and predictor variables. In particular, we control for the percentage of the foreign
population, the number of asylum applications, general government deficit, GDP per capita, and
unemployment. The data of the control variables come from the Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD) and, in the case of the number of asylum seekers, from
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). These variables are measured
annually.
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NEWS ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC CONCERN ABOUT IMMIGRATION 9
Figure 2. Media coverage and public concern about immigration, random effects models. [Colour figure can be
viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
Media coverage and public concern about immigration
Figure 2shows the results of the panel data analysis using random effect models (Supporting
Information, Appendix D). In models 1 and 2, we examine the effect of the volume of news
and political claims on public concern about immigration. The proportion of news (model 1) and
claims (model 2) about immigration and integration is positively associated with immigration being
ranked as an important issue. A one-point increase of the standard deviation of the proportion of
news and claims increases around 0.23 standard deviations of public concern about immigration.
The substantive results are the same when using a fixed effects model (Supporting Information,
Appendix D).
In models 3 and 4, we investigate the influence of the tone of political claims on the proportion
of respondents who rank immigration among the MII facing their country. While the proportion of
positive claims does not explain the variance in the importance associated with immigration by the
public (model 3), the proportion of negative claims is significantly associated with a higher score
for public concern about immigration (model 4). A one-point increase in the standard deviation
of the proportion of negative claims increases 0.26 standard deviations of public concern about
immigration. These models do not consider other potential confounders that may influence both
the dependent and independent variables under analysis.
Figure 3shows the effect of salience and tone of immigration-related topics in the media on
the electorate’s ranking of immigration among the MII facing their country, controlling for other
variables (Supporting Information, Appendix D). The interpretation of a significant role for the
media holds after having taken into consideration other variables that may shape both the outcome
and predictor variables. Notably, we include objective measures of migration stocks and economic
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10 JOÃO CARVALHO, MARIANA CARMO DUARTE & DIDIER RUEDIN
Figure 3. Media coverage and public concern about immigration, random effects models with control variables.
[Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
performance – the share of the foreign population, the number of asylum applications, general
government deficit, GDP per capita and unemployment rates. With the present analysis, we can
clearly show that increasing media coverage of immigration is associated with an increase in the
public’s ranking of immigration among the MII facing the country: The media environment has
agenda-setting effects on public concern about immigration.
The media coverage of immigration in newspapers seems a good predictor of public concern
about immigration: The volume of both news (model 1) and political claims (model 2) in national
newspapers are good predictors of the electorate’s ranking of immigration among the MII facing
their country. In models 1 and 2, a one-point increase of the standard deviation of the proportion
of news and political claims increases by 0.18 standard deviations of the stated importance
of migration. The substantive results are remarkably similar when using a fixed effects model
(Supporting Information, Appendix D). These results suggest that salience of either form – object
salience or attribute salience – matter for public concern about immigration.
In models 3 and 4, we estimate the effect of the tone of the political claims (positive or
negative) on public concern about immigration, holding constant other variables on migration
flows and the economic context. A higher proportion of positive claims is negatively associated
with individuals’ perceived importance of immigration (model 3), while a higher share of negative
claims is associated with the increase of the importance attached to immigration in comparison
to other policy-related issues (model 4). A one-point increase in the standard deviation of the
proportion of positive claims is associated with 0.16 standard deviations lower public concern
about immigration, and a one-point increase in the standard deviation of the proportion of negative
claims with 0.26 standard deviations higher concern.
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NEWS ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC CONCERN ABOUT IMMIGRATION 11
Robustness
To assess the validity and robustness of these results, we test for reverse causality (Supporting
Information, Appendix E). The results indicate that changes in public concern about immigration
do not predict changes in the media variables, mainly when using the proportion of news and
political claims as outcome variables. Notwithstanding, public concern about immigration seems to
be a good predictor of the proportion of negative claims, limiting causal interpretations in this case.
We also perform a time-reversed analysis (Supporting Information, Appendix F). The evidence
shows that changes in public concern about immigration are not predicted by changes in the volume
of news and claims and the proportion of positive claims. However, the results also suggest that
the proportion of negative claims predicts public concern about immigration. Taken together, this
evidence may indicate some drifting or measurement issues in the case of negative claims, although
the general results hold.7
We also perform leave-one-out analyses to ensure that the main results are not driven by one
single case (Supporting Information, Appendix G). The results hold when each country is left out
one at a time, except when using the proportion of positive claims as the main predictor. The main
findings suggest that this variable only has a negative effect on public concern about immigration
when other factors are controlled for. This effect holds when data from Belgium, Portugal, Spain
and the UK are removed separately from the model. However, it becomes insignificant when
each of the remaining countries (Austria, Ireland and the Netherlands) is removed one at a time
(Supporting Information, Appendix G). This evidence limits the interpretation of the effect of
positive claims on public concern about immigration.
Discussion and conclusion
Looking at media coverage of immigration in the 2000s, we show that the media environment
appears to have a substantial influence over public concern about immigration in comparison to
other topics. Notwithstanding the thesis of minimal media effects in much of the literature, the
visibility of immigration in the print media was positively related to the ranking of immigration
in the MII in seven Western EU countries. In our analysis, the media coverage of immigration has
a relevant effect on temporal dynamics over a period of 7 years, without disaggregating the news
content by issue such as crime or terrorism (McLaren et al., 2018). Remarkably, at an aggregate
level, the effects of the media environment are very consistent across the public. Our aggregate
analysis suggests that the effects of the news environment are transversal to the general electorate
rather than focused on specific segments or dependent on the predispositions of the electorate
(Lecheler et al., 2019).
Most existing studies focus on mass-mediated communication to study the politicisation of
immigration and simultaneously exclude the media as a potential predictor variable of public
concern about immigration (Grande et al., 2019; Hutter & Kriesi, 2021). Consequently, the
politicisation of immigration has been strongly linked to the agency of political parties, especially
radical right parties, and the patterns of interparty competition (Hadj Abdou et al., 2022; Hutter
&Kriesi,2021). However, our results suggest that the media may not be a neutral actor in the
politicisation of immigration. While the importance of opinion pieces by journalists and editors
may be limited (Van der Brug et al., 2015), the work of journalists and editors in selecting articles
about immigration and highlighting the topic has substantial repercussions on public concern about
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12 JOÃO CARVALHO, MARIANA CARMO DUARTE & DIDIER RUEDIN
immigration. In this regard, further analysis should be undertaken to explain the variation in media
coverage of immigration at the cross-national level and to explore its role behind the emergence of
the new ‘cultural cleavage’ at the European level.
While we cannot examine the content of the news articles included in the statistical analysis,
previous research conducted in the Netherlands and Flanders (two of our cases) between 1999 and
2015 provides important insights. Jacobs et al. (2018) highlighted the lack of a direct relationship
between news coverage of immigration and real-world indicators or societal developments. The
media took a specific approach to immigration as a news issue, often highlighting topics related to
group conflicts like crime and terrorism (Jacobs et al., 2018). In the UK, a national report on media
coverage published in the early 2010s highlighted the recurrent negative and distorted discussion
of asylum seekers in the media (Leveson, 2012). We believe that the development of the so-called
2015 ‘refugee crisis’ did not alter these patterns, but our results suggest that the increased visibility
of immigration in the media was most likely followed by an intensification of public concern
about immigration. Since immigration is mostly a non-obtrusive issue, the public’s awareness of
immigration-related events at the national and international levels is likely to be mediated by the
media coverage of the topic rather than derived from self-experience.
In our view, the ideological characteristics of the electorate cannot be activated or influenced
in the absence of cues in the media about the importance or meaning of immigration (Friedman,
2012). Moreover, we argue that if consistent effects can be found between media coverage of
immigration and the level of public salience of this social phenomenon in general, this means
that media effects can trump political predispositions towards immigration. Indeed, we focus on
the importance attached to immigration rather than on public attitudes or policy preferences. The
stability of political predispositions seems to diverge from the intense fluctuations in the level of
public salience of immigration (Hatton, 2021). Indeed, in the autumn of 2006, 68 per cent of the
Spanish respondents indicated immigration as the most important issue, but it seems unlikely that
two-thirds of the electorate shared ideological predispositions or agreed on why immigration was
important (Ros & Morales, 2015).
Our results have important implications for the development of research on immigration
politics and policy. Much of this political research is predicated on the gap hypothesis, which
argues that a public backlash is fuelled by a significant and persistent gap between the policy
inputs and outcomes of policy implementation on immigration control (Hollifield et al., 2014).
Here we suggest that variation in the importance attached to immigration relative to other policy
issues is closely linked to media coverage of immigration, challenging the role of policy gaps.
Put differently, our research suggests that the volume of news or political claims are perhaps
more important to understand public concern about immigration than generally assumed in
migration studies. From a theoretical perspective, increased media coverage of immigration and the
subsequent expansion of public concern about immigration can potentially help the political parties
that usually own the issue of opposition to this social phenomenon – far-right parties (Damstra
et al., 2021; Mudde, 2019).
Following the thermostatic model of policy making, there are competing explanations for
whether policymakers should ignore or follow public demands on immigration (Morales et al.,
2015). Our finding, that public concern about immigration can be strongly related to media
coverage, implies that the legislator’s focus on policy developments may not capture a relevant
dimension that shapes issue salience. While the implementation of restrictive legislation can have
a strong influence on the nature and intensity of migration inflows (Czaika & de Haas, 2013),
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NEWS ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC CONCERN ABOUT IMMIGRATION 13
it may still not mitigate the intense salience of immigration, because public judgments on the
topic are not strongly influenced by actual migration flows – the number of asylum seekers does
predict public concern about immigration, though. Our research suggests that the government’s
responsiveness to increasing the salience of immigration through the enactment of legislation will
probably contribute to maintaining or even increasing the visibility of immigration in the media
and the number of political claims with a negative tone (Van der Brug et al., 2015). This approach
is likely to have counterproductive effects, leading to increased public concern about immigration.
We can identify three limitations of the present analysis that should be addressed in future
research. First, the aggregated statistical approach prevents us from accounting for individual-
level confounding variables, such as individual social and political predispositions or voting for
far-right parties. Thus, we cannot explain variation in patterns of media coverage across the
countries beyond the relatively broad control variables included, although we have little reason
to believe that such predispositions change substantially over the course of a few months. Second,
we note that a longer time frame may be important to confirm the overall conclusions of our
study. This endeavour requires substantial effort to extend the cross-national content analysis of
the media coverage of immigration into the 2010s, although such research may need to account for
the confounding influence of social media, which is now much more widespread. Third, further
research is needed to explore the potential link between media coverage of immigration and the
variation in behavioural measures such as the electoral support for radical right parties in Europe,
hate crime or discrimination.
Our analysis suggests that an increasing volume of news and political claims about immigration
in the news is associated with an expansion of the public’s ranking of this social phenomenon
relative to other policy-related issues. The news environment can be an exogenous actor that
can directly influence public concern about immigration – which is consistent with the top-down
elite approach – and its effects could be seen in the general electorate. Rather than following
consumers’ preferences, media coverage of immigration seems to guide the electorate’s perception
of the importance attached to the topic. At the same time, research on the politics of international
migration should explore the role of the media environment as a predictor variable, moving beyond
the current exclusive focus on the agency of political parties, or the influence of policy gaps on
immigration control. Future research should also explore the impact of the news environment on
topics such as the emergence of the ‘cultural cleavage’, the electoral support for parties that own
this issue, and the levels of hate crime.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the work and comments provided by: Erik Bleich,
Elizabeth Carter, Charles Lees, Pedro Magalhães, James Deninson, Joanna Clifton-Sprigg, Lenka
Dražanová, Sabina Kubiciel-Lodzinska, Sebastian Rinken, and the anonymous reviewers. Didier
Ruedin has a secondary affiliation at the University of the Witwatersrand. Mariana Carmo Duarte
was affiliated with the European University Institute when this article was submitted.
Funding Information
João Carvalho was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the
grant:2021.02779.CEECIND/CP1694/CT0010
© 2024 The Authors. European Journal of Political Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Consortium for Political Research.
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14 JOÃO CARVALHO, MARIANA CARMO DUARTE & DIDIER RUEDIN
Mariana Carmo Duarte was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and
Technology under the PhD grant SFRH/BD/150290/2019.
Online Appendix
Additional supporting information may be found in the Online Appendix section at the end of the
article:
Supporting Information
Notes
1. For exceptions see: Dunaway et al. (2010) and Hatton (2021).
2. According to Przeworski and Teune (1970, p. 33): ‘intersystemic similarities and intersystemic differences
are the focus of ’most similar systems‘ designs. Systems constitute the original level of analysis, and within-
system variations are explained in terms of systemic factors. Although these designs rarely have been formulated
rigorously, their logic is fairly clear. Common system characteristics are conceived of as ’controlled for’, whereas
intersystemic differences are viewed as explanatory variables.’
3. Past research concluded that the politicisation of immigration ‘is often to a large extent a top-down process,
where the politicisation takes place in response to government actions’ (Van der Brug et al., 2015, p. 184).
4. According to Landman (2008, p. 72), the use of a most similar systems design requires the observation of
variation of the dependent variable or ‘a particular outcome’ across similar countries.
5. In substantive terms, the political claims related to immigration were classified according to a five-point scale,
ranging from ‘strongly restrictive to migrants/conservative/pro-national residents, mono-cultural to strongly open
to migrants, progressive, cosmopolitan/multicultural’ (Van der Brug et al., 2015, p. 29).
6. The variance components in the random effect models is estimated using the method ‘walhus’.
7. In both analyses, public concern about immigration is measured at t =0 and the media variables are measured
at t+6.
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Address for correspondence: João Carvalho, Centro de Estudos e Investigação em Sociologia, ISCTE-Instituto
Universitário de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, Email: joao.miguel.carvalho@iscte-iul.pt
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