Narratives on migration and political polarization: How the emphasis in narratives can drive us apart

Eugenio Levi (), Michael Bayerlein, Gianluca Grimalda and Tommaso Reggiani ()
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Eugenio Levi: Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Piazza dell’Universita 1, 00139 Bolzano, Italy; Masaryk University, Czechia
Michael Bayerlein: German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), Ludwigkirchplatz 3-4, 10719 Berlin, Germany

MUNI ECON Working Papers from Masaryk University

Abstract: Nowadays, immigration is a polarizing topic in politics. In this paper, we investigate how much this political polarization is driven by the depiction narratives made of immigrants vis-a-vis the natives. Furthermore, we look at whether polarization is rooted in private preferences over narratives or in how they are endorsed in public settings and social media. Our empirical strategy consists of a survey experiment in the 2021 German elections and a field experiment on Twitter in which we manipulate the “pinned tweets” of experimental users. To build our narratives, we manipulate either the policy position — hostile toward or accepting migration — or an emphasis on the out-group, on the in-group, or on economic reciprocity. We find that political polarization is driven both by the policy position and emphasis in narratives. On Twitter, the out-group emphasis drives supporters of different parties apart, and the corresponding hostile narrative becomes the only one going viral. In the survey, right-wing participants prefer the reciprocity emphasis more, but we still find evidence of more polarization when allowing the participants to go public.

Keywords: immigration; narratives; political polarization; economic reciprocity; experiments; Twitter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D72 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2023-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-int, nep-mig and nep-ure
Note: License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mub:wpaper:2023-07

DOI: 10.5817/WP_MUNI_ECON_2023-07

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