Anti-Muslim Voting and Media Coverage of Immigrant Crimes

Mathieu Couttenier, Sophie Hatte, Mathias Thoenig and Stephanos Vlachos

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2024, vol. 106, issue 2, 576-585

Abstract: We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacts voting in one of the most controversial referendums in recent years—the 2009 Swiss minaret ban. We combine a comprehensive crime detection data set with detailed information on newspaper coverage. We first document a large upward distortion in media reporting of immigrant crime during the prereferendum period. Exploiting quasi-random variations in crime incidence, we find a positive first-order effect of news coverage on support for the ban. Our quantification shows that, in absence of the media bias, the pro-ban vote would have decreased from 57.6% to 53.5% at the national level.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01152
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:tpr:restat:v:106:y:2024:i:2:p:576-585

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().