Terrorism, Media Attitudes Towards Migration and Votes: Evidence from France

This paper investigates media attitudes towards migration in the aftermath of terrorist attacks and examines their impact on voting outcomes. Using natural language processing (NLP) methods, we analyze French news articles on immigration before and after three major terrorist events in 2015 and 2016. Our findings show that the salience of immigration in the French media (especially National media) increased for up to eight weeks following the attacks. In particular, in the first three weeks, where immigration was evoked with Muslims or (in)security-related issues, salience increased fivefold.

Furthermore, the tone of reporting became significantly more negative, though this effect was shorter in duration, albeit lasting for at least two weeks. Further, we show how this change in media behaviour have participated to the increase in votes in favor of the main anti-migrant party in France, at the Élections Régionales, held 3 weeks after the November 13 attack. We could estimate a contribution of the media's change in behaviour to the total rise in votes for the Far-right of about 2% on average. In some French localities however, we estimated the contribution to reach more than 12%. * The authors wish to thank the French-ANR (contract LEO18053) funding for the work undertaken in this paper. In its earlier versions, the paper has benefited from great comments of many collegues, including especially Olivier Bargain,