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The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 106 No. 2 2024

Anti-Muslim Voting and Media Coverage of Immigrant Crimes

Mathieu Couttenier1; Sophie Hatte2; Mathias Thoenig3; Stephanos Vlachos4

1 Université de Lyon, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Center for Economic Research on Governance, Inequality and Conflict, and CEPR · 2 Université de Lyon, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Center for Economic Research on Governance, Inequality and Conflict · 3 Department of Economics, University of Lausanne; IMD and CEPR · 4 University of Vienna

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.

DOI
10.1162/rest_a_01152
Volume
106
Issue
2
Pages
576-585
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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