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The interplay between refugee inflows and media coverage in determining attitudes towards immigrants in Germany

Chia-Jung Tsai, Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Robert Gordon Rinderknecht, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Emilio Zagheni, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)

In this study, we examine the effect of increasing refugees on the rise of anti-immigrant attitudes across German regions. We explore how the interaction of media coverage and demographic changes affects anti-immigrant attitudes. This study relies on data from the German Socio-Economic-Panel (2011-2017), data of asylum applications from the Federal Office of Statistics, and the Gdelt database, which is a real-time database for news all over the world. The Gdelt database provides information about the amount of news production and attitudes in news text. Using a mixed effect approach, we show that the effect of immigrant presence on anti-immigrant attitudes across macro-regions, including the former West and East Germany, is moderated by the amount of media coverage. As the refugee presence in a region causes a rise in anti-immigrant attitudes, the increasing media attention on refugees in some regions amplify this relationship. Based on this, we conclude that media coverage plays an essential, albeit inconsistent, role in politicizing changes in the population composition as threats, and thus in triggering anti-immigrant attitudes.

Keywords: Migrant populations, Refugees, Digital and computational demography, Multi-level modeling

See paper.

  Presented in Session 148. Refugees, Policies and Public Opinion