The drowning-refugee effect: media salience and xenophobic attitudes

Silvia De Poli, Niklas Jakobsson and Simone Schüller

Munich Reprints in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study whether salient media coverage of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean affects individual xenophobic attitudes. We combine a randomized survey experiment - a variant of the classic trolley dilemma' - that implicitly elicits individual attitudes towards foreigners, with variation in interview timing, and find that such issue salience significantly decreases xenophobic attitudes by 2.2 percentage points. Our results thus support the idea that exposure to news describing immigrants as victims (instead of a threat) can significantly affect public opinion and mitigate bias against immigrants.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Applied Economics Letters 16 24(2017): pp. 1167-1172

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: The drowning-refugee effect: media salience and xenophobic attitudes (2017)
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:lmu:muenar:49872

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Munich Reprints in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics Ludwigstr. 28, 80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tamilla Benkelberg ().