The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives' Attitudes Towards Immigration

Sekou Keita, Thomas Renault and Jérôme Valette

Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL

Abstract: Immigration and crime are two first-order issues that are often considered jointly in people's minds. This paper analyzes how media reporting policies on crime impact natives' attitudes towards immigration. We depart from most studies by investigating the content of crime-related articles instead of their coverage. Specifically, we use a radical change in local media reporting on crime in Germany as a natural experiment. This unique framework allows us to estimate whether systematically disclosing the places of origin of criminals affects natives' attitudes towards immigration. We combine individual survey data collected between January 2014 and December 2018 from the German SocioEconomic Panel with data from more than 545,000 crime-related articles in German newspapers and data on their diffusion across the country. Our results indicate that systematically mentioning the origins of criminals, especially when offenders are natives, significantly reduces natives' concerns about immigration.

Keywords: Immigration; Crime; Media Bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-ure
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03167833
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published in 2021

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03167833/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives’ Attitudes Towards Immigration (2024)
Working Paper: The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives’ Attitudes Towards Immigration (2024)
Journal Article: The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives’ Attitudes Towards Immigration (2023)
Working Paper: The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives’ Attitudes Towards Immigration (2022)
Working Paper: The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives' Attitudes Towards Immigration (2022)
Working Paper: The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives' Attitudes Towards Immigration (2022)
Working Paper: The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives' Attitudes Towards Immigration (2021)
Working Paper: The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives' Attitudes Towards Immigration (2021)
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:cesptp:halshs-03167833

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().