Public debate in the media matters: evidence from the European refugee crisis

Caleb M Koch,Karsten Donnay,Izabela Moise,Dirk Helbing

doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00229-8

Caleb M Koch, Karsten Donnay + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00229-8

Copy DOI

Abstract

In this paper, we take a novel approach to study the empirical relationship between public debate in the media and asylum acceptance rates in Europe from 2002–2016. In theory, an asylum seeker should experience the same likelihood of being granted refugee status from each of the 20 European countries we study. Yet, in practice, acceptance rates vary widely for nearly every asylum country of origin. We address this inconsistency with a data-driven approach by analyzing refugee-related news articles and data on asylum decisions across 20 Europe countries for more than 100 asylum seekers’ countries of origin. We find that: (i) public debate sentiment in the media is strongly associated with European countries’ diverging asylum practices, much more so than social, cultural or economic factors, and (ii) by combining different measures of public debate we can make out-of-sample predictions within 3% of true acceptance rates (on average). We conclude by discussing the practical implications of our findings for European asylum practices.

Highlights

The European refugee crisis—a term used by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and widely adopted by the media to describe the influx of asylum seekers into Europe in 2015—has played a prominent role in European Union (EU) politics
It should be noted that the distinct country-level perspective taken in this paper offers some advantages: (i) we have access to a considerable amount of data, (ii) we can take a Europe-wide perspective in our analysis, which allows us to compare, for example, the United Kingdom (UK) and Spain, and (iii) we can study the influence of public debate while controlling for key country-specific socio-economic covariates and important explanatory factors such as refugees’ countries of origin
6 Discussion and conclusion Our study was motivated by the observation that—despite the 1951 Geneva Convention, several follow-up international conventions, and a Europe-wide consensus on citizen preferences towards migration—we observe significant nationallevel variation in asylum practices across Europe

Summary

Introduction

The European refugee crisis—a term used by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and widely adopted by the media to describe the influx of asylum seekers into Europe in 2015—has played a prominent role in EU politics. It should be noted that the distinct country-level perspective taken in this paper offers some advantages: (i) we have access to a considerable amount of data, (ii) we can take a Europe-wide perspective in our analysis, which allows us to compare, for example, the UK and Spain, and (iii) we can study the influence of public debate while controlling for key country-specific socio-economic covariates and important explanatory factors such as refugees’ countries of origin These are novel features of our data-driven approach, and we are the first, to the best of our knowledge, to combine a big dataset of refugee-related news articles with official EU asylum statistics. A recent study in Finland found that social media over-emphasized news articles with crime and threat-oriented themes on refugee issues, while positive articles about refugees where under-emphasized [47]

Media data

Findings

Discussion and conclusion