Applied Economics Letters

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The drowning-refugee effect: media salience and

xenophobic attitudes

Silvia De Poli, Niklas Jakobsson & Simone Schüller

To cite this article: Silvia De Poli, Niklas Jakobsson & Simone Schüller (2016): The drowning-
refugee effect: media salience and xenophobic attitudes, Applied Economics Letters, DOI:
10.1080/13504851.2016.1262513

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APPLIED ECONOMICS LETTERS, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504851.2016.1262513

The drowning-refugee effect: media salience and xenophobic attitudes

Silvia De Polia, Niklas Jakobssonb,c and Simone Schüllera,d,e
a
FBK-IRVAPP, Trento, Italy; bKarlstad Business School, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden; cNorwegian Social Research (NOVA), Oslo,
Norway; dIfo Center for Industrial Organisation and New Technologies, Ifo Institute, Munich, Germany; eIZA, Bonn, Germany

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
We study whether salient media coverage of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean affects Media salience; trolley
individual xenophobic attitudes. We combine a randomized survey experiment – a variant of the problem; xenophobia;
classic ‘trolley dilemma’ – that implicitly elicits individual attitudes towards foreigners, with refugees; attitudes towards
variation in interview timing, and find that such issue salience significantly decreases xenophobic immigration
attitudes by 2.2 percentage points. Our results thus support the idea that exposure to news JEL CLASSIFICATION
describing immigrants as victims (instead of a threat) can significantly affect public opinion and D72; D83; J61
mitigate bias against immigrants.

I. Introduction
There is increasing interest in how mass media affects
public opinion (Weaver, McCombs, and Shaw 2004;
DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007). Asylum-seeker migra-
tion is currently one of the most salient issues in
Europe. There is ample evidence that (overwhel-
mingly negatively biased) media exposure perpetuates
stereotypic attitudes towards ethnic minorities or
immigrants (e.g. Facchini, Mayda, and Publisi 2009).
However, exposure to news describing asylum-seekers
as victims rather than as threats may reduce xeno-
phobic attitudes (Schemer 2014).
Media effects on public opinion are more likely
when issues are concrete rather than abstract and
when issues involve dramatic events (Soroko 2002).
We study whether salient media coverage of immi-
grants drowning in the Mediterranean reduces indi-
vidual xenophobic attitudes. An important
contribution of our study is that our measures of
xenophobic attitudes are not based on explicit survey
questions, but implicitly elicited via a randomized
survey experiment employing a version of the trolley
dilemma (Thomson 1985; Costa et al. 2014), making
it less likely that our findings are affected by social
desirability bias. We estimate causal effects by exploit-
ing variation in survey response timing around a
considerable peak in news reporting about refugee
drownings due to termination of operation ‘Mare
Nostrum’ in late 2014. We find that increased issue
salience of asylum-seekers drowning in the
Mediterranean reduced negative attitudes towards
foreigners by 2.2 percentage points.
II. Data and methodology
We use data from a web survey conducted from 28
October to 4 November 2014 in four European
countries (France, the Netherlands, Germany and
Spain). The web survey (N = 13144; response rate:
37.7%) was administered via Alstra AB in France
(N = 3030), Germany (N = 3029), the Netherlands
(N = 2008), Spain (N = 2037) and the United
Kingdom (N = 3040). We drop the United
Kingdom due to differential timing and content of
news coverage on ‘Mare Nostrum’ and ‘Triton’ (the
United Kingdom did not participate in Triton). We
drop 281 observations due to incomplete answers,
rendering a final sample of 9823 respondents. The
sample is fairly representative with respect to gender,
whereas the highly educated are slightly overrepre-
sented (see Table A1 in the Appendix). Importantly,
the survey includes a ‘foreigner/native’ version of the
trolley dilemma (Thomson 1985), which serves as an
implicit attitude test.
Moreover, the timing of the survey allows investi-
gating the effects of intensified media reporting on

CONTACT Simone Schüller schueller.s@ifo.de Ifo Institute, Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, Poschingerstr.5,
D-81679 Munich, Germany
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 S. DE POLI ET AL.

refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, which started
on Friday, 31 October 2014. That day, the Italian
government announced the phasing out of operation
‘Mare Nostrum.’ News coverage was immediate and
extensive in all European countries, and included cov-
erage of the Frontex border protection operation
‘Triton,’ a smaller search and rescue operation than
‘Mare Nostrum,’ which was initiated on 1 November.
Overall, termination of ‘Mare Nostrum’ and its super-
session by ‘Triton’ was criticized as likely to result in an
increased death rate in the Mediterranean of migrants
to Europe (Tazzioli 2016).
Our empirical strategy relies on randomization
into different versions of the trolley problem, on
the one hand, and on variation in response timing
on the other. All respondents received the survey on
28 October and had one week to answer. We com-
pare the group of interviewees who responded
between 28 October and 30 October with the
group of interviewees who responded on 31
October or after, that is, on or after the day of the
news peak.
Figure 1 illustrates the news peak on the phasing-
out of ‘Mare Nostrum.’ Most articles mention the
incidence of shipwreck disasters in the
Mediterranean, the number of people saved (roughly
100 000) during ‘Mare Nostrum’ and the number of
deaths in the Mediterranean Sea (about 3000 in
100
80
Number of news
60
40
20
0
14
2014). News was frequently accompanied by pictures
of overburdened refugee boats.
We use the footbridge version of the trolley pro-
blem, in which one imagines standing on a foot-
bridge overlooking a train track. A train is about to
kill five people unless a heavy man is pushed off the
footbridge in front of the train. This will kill him,
but save the five. A utilitarian analysis dictates sacri-
ficing one to save five, but this would violate the
moral prohibition against killing (Thomson 1985;
Greene et al. 2001). Previous research based on
variations of the trolley problem shows that people
tend to protect their in-groups at expense of out-
groups (e.g. Uhlmann et al. 2009; Cikara et al. 2010;
Ginges et al. 2016). Cikara et al. (2010) find also that
stereotypes led people to value some lives over
others in moral trade-off scenarios and that different
outgroup members’ lives are not valued equivalently.
In our version of the trolley problem, respondents
are randomized into two different versions: (1) ‘for-
eigner version’: the man to be pushed is a foreigner
and the five to be saved are natives; (2) ‘native
version’: the man to be pushed is a native and the
five to be saved are foreigners. The answer options
are Push, Do not push and Do not want to answer. In
Table A2 in the Appendix, we assess the randomiza-
tion quality, finding that random assignment was
successful with respect to observables.

14

14

4
01

01

01

01

01
20

20

20

/2

/2

/2

/2

/2
8/

9/

0/

/1

/2

/3

/4
/2

/2

/3

/3

11

11

11

11
10

10

10

10

Day of survey

Figure 1. News articles about ‘Mare Nostrum’ and ‘Triton’ by survey day.
Source: Europe Media Monitor – Newsbrief.
Notes: Data collected employing the search terms ‘Triton’ and/or ‘Nostrum’ for the countries included in the survey. Articles not in the language of
the respective country or out of context excluded. Figure A.1. in the Appendix illustrates the news peak based on data collected from Lexis Nexis
instead of EMM-Newsbrief.
 APPLIED ECONOMICS LETTERS 3

Table 1. Summary statistics.

.14
Survey question on the trolley problem:

.12
Foreigner version Native version
Normalized Normalized

.1
Variables Before After difference Before After difference
−0.07 −0.05

.08
Male 0.49 0.44 0.49 0.45
Age <35 0.20 0.24 0.06 0.19 0.22 0.06
Age 35–44 0.22 0.23 0.03 0.21 0.21 0.00

.06
Age 45–54 0.25 0.23 −0.04 0.25 0.26 0.02
Age >55 0.33 0.30 −0.05 0.35 0.30 −0.07

.04
Live in urban 0.35 0.32 −0.04 0.33 0.33 0.00
area

.02
Education: 0.38 0.40 0.03 0.37 0.38 0.01
university

0
Education: 0.54 0.55 0.01 0.55 0.58 0.04
Before After
secondary
school Native version Foreigner version
Education: 0.08 0.05 −0.08 0.08 0.04 −0.10
other Figure 2. Descriptive evidence – probability to push.
At least one 0.31 0.35 0.06 0.30 0.32 0.02
child
Married 0.59 0.60 0.01 0.59 0.60 0.00
Unemployed 0.09 0.09 −0.01 0.09 0.09 −0.02 vector of covariates (see Table 1) and Y is equal to 1
Employed 0.58 0.62 0.05 0.57 0.59 0.03 if the answer is Push (Do not push and Do not want
Occupation: 0.33 0.30 −0.05 0.34 0.32 −0.02
other to answer); 0 otherwise. γ represents the ATE esti-
France 0.30 0.29 −0.03 0.30 0.31 0.02
Germany 0.34 0.19 −0.24 0.34 0.19 −0.24
mated in the respective block. The overall ATE is the
Netherlands 0.15 0.34 0.32 0.16 0.34 0.30 weighted average of these single-block ATEs.
Spain 0.21 0.18 −0.05 0.21 0.17 −0.08
Notes: ‘Before’ = respondents between 28 and 30 October,
‘After’ = respondents on 31 October or after. Normalized difference is
the difference in average covariate values normalized by the SD of these III. Results
covariates. Normalized differences exceeding 0.25 are substantial (Imbens
and Wooldridge 2009). Figure 2 shows the distribution of the answer ‘push’
to the two versions of the trolley problem for
Most participants (68%) respond before the news respondents before and after the news peak. Before,
peak (see Table A3 in the Appendix). Since the day respondents randomized into the foreigner version
of response is not randomized but self-chosen, sys- were more likely to push than those answering the
tematic differences between early and late respon- native version. After the news peak, this is no longer
dents may bias our results. Table 1 reports summary the case. We next test whether – adjusting for cov-
statistics of individual characteristics by version of ariates – response changes are statistically
the trolley dilemma and by interview date (before/ significant.
after October 31). Table 2 presents the effects of salient media cover-
There are few substantial differences in observable age on answers to the trolley dilemma using BRA
characteristics between respondents before and after matching, kernel matching and OLS. Among inter-
the news peak. However, we adjust for these differ- viewees randomized into the foreigner version, indi-
ences employing blocking with regression adjust- viduals responding after the news peak were
ment (BRA) as proposed by Imbens (2015) as well significantly less likely to push, with effect magni-
as with traditional kernel matching. The BRA esti- tudes ranging from 1.9 to 2.2 percentage points.
mator computes the average treatment effect (ATE) Moreover, they were more likely to not push,
by performing linear regressions within intervals which indicates that exposure to extensive news
(blocks) of the propensity score in common support. coverage about drowning migrants moved respon-
Within each block, the regression includes all cov- dents who otherwise would have pushed towards not
ariates as well as the treatment indicator: pushing. This increased probability to refrain from
pushing is statistically significant at the 10% level in
Y ¼ α þ βX þ γT þ ε; the OLS regressions, whereas it just fails to reach
conventional levels of significance when employing
where T is a dummy equal to 1 if the respondent matching techniques. Changes in nonresponse are
answered after the news peak; 0 otherwise. X is a not statistically significant and close to zero.
4 S. DE POLI ET AL.

Table 2. ATE estimates of responding after the news peak on answers to trolley dilemma.
Push Do not push Don’t want to answer
Trolley version Estimator ATE SE ATE SE ATE SE
Foreigner version BRA matching −0.022** 0.011 0.028 0.018 −0.007 0.017
Kernel matching −0.019* 0.010 0.027 0.017 −0.008 0.017
OLS −0.022** 0.010 0.029* 0.017 −0.008 0.016
OLS (with controls) −0.019* 0.010 0.030* 0.017 −0.011 0.016
Native version BRA matching −0.008 0.010 −0.011 0.018 0.020 0.017
Kernel matching −0.007 0.009 −0.013 0.017 0.019 0.017
OLS −0.006 0.009 −0.011 0.017 0.018 0.017
OLS (with control −0.006 0.009 −0.010 0.017 0.016 0.017
Note: Controls as presented in Table 1.
***p < 0.01, **p < 0.05, *p < 0.1.

Table 3. ATE of responding after news peak to other moral
questions.
In support of In support of
gender equality prostitution
Trolley version ATE SE ATE SE
Foreigner version −0.001 0.013 0.000 0.018
Native version 0.004 0.012 −0.013 0.017
Notes: BRA matching results. Survey questions: ‘Is gender equality impor-
tant?’, ‘Is it according to you morally justified or morally wrong to sell
sex?’, ‘Homosexuals should be allowed to marry?’. Responses on a 10-
point scale are recoded as support if >5.
Among respondents randomized into the native
version, there is no significant difference in how indi-
viduals respond before and after the news peak. If
media coverage of asylum-seekers as victims reduces
xenophobic attitudes, we would expect changes in
responses to the trolley problem in its foreigner rather
than its native version, which is exactly what we find.
Another way to test whether the shifts are due to
issue salience is to assess answers to moral questions
that should not be affected by news about drowning
asylum-seekers. We find no shifts in responses
before and after the news peak in ‘placebo’ regres-
sions concerning moral questions about homosexu-
ality, gender equality and prostitution (see Table 3).
IV. Conclusions
Our results suggest that salient media coverage of
refugees drowning in the Mediterranean reduces
xenophobic attitudes. We combine a randomized
survey experiment with variation in interview timing
and find that issue salience due to the phasing-out of
‘Mare Nostrum’ has an immediate effect of reducing
individual xenophobic attitudes by 2.2 percentage
points.
In view of overwhelmingly negatively biased
media reporting perpetuating stereotypic attitudes
towards foreigners, and increasing asylum-seeker
inflows in many European countries, these results
are particularly important. We show that media have
In support of not only the power to increase negative attitudes
gay marriage
ATE SE
towards foreigners, but also to reduce negative atti-
0.000 0.015 tudes – depending on whether immigrants are
0.017 0.015 depicted as a threat or as victims.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful for comments provided by Marco Bertoni,
Carl Bonander, Andreas Kotsadam, Sofia Jonsson, Enrico
Rettore and seminar participants at FBK-IRVAPP and at
the CEMIR seminar. We thank Deborah Willow for excellent
editorial assistance and Stefanie Gäbler for outstanding
research assistance. Part of this research was conducted
while Niklas Jakobsson and Simone Schüller were visiting
FBK-IRVAPP.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Appendix

Table A2. Trolley survey experiment –

randomization quality.
80

Dep. var.: assignment foreigner version

Male −0.003
(0.026)
60

Age <35 (ref.)

Number of news

Age 35–44 −0.024

(0.040)
40

Age 45–54 −0.064*

(0.039)
Age >55 −0.033
(0.040)
20

Live in urban area 0.034

(0.028)
Education: other (ref.)
0

Education: university 0.004

10/28/2014 10/30/2014 11/1/2014 11/3/2014 11/5/2014 (0.057)
Day Education: secondary school −0.009
(0.054)
Figure A1. News articles about mare nostrum and triton by At least one child 0.042
survey day. (0.032)
Married 0.002
Source: LexisNexis. (0.027)
Notes: Data collected employing the search terms ‘Triton’ and/or Occupation: other (ref.)
‘Nostrum’ for each day of the survey and for the countries included Unemployed −0.000
in the survey. Articles not in the language of the respective country or (0.050)
out of context excluded. Employed 0.029
(0.031)
France (ref.)
Germany 0.010
Table A1. Representativeness of the sample. (0.035)
% Male % High education Netherlands 0.010
(0.038)
Country Population Sample Population Sample Spain 0.002
Germany 50.3 43.7 31.4 49.5 (0.038)
Spain 50.3 52.4 42.3 55.5 Constant −0.007
France 49.3 46.7 44.1 49.6 (0.069)
Netherland 50.2 50.5 44.6 68.6 N 9,823
Source: National statistics from Eurostat (2015).
6 S. DE POLI ET AL.

Table A3. Number of interviews by date and country.

Interview date France Germany Netherlands Spain
Before 28 October 2014, Tuesday 139 152 111 91
29 October 2014, Wednesday 1156 1403 694 856
30 October 2014, Thursday 943 951 350 610
Total 2238 2506 1155 1557
After 31 October 2014, Friday 215 241 77 160
1 November 2014, Saturday 91 109 471 63
2 November 2014, Sunday 84 79 150 44
3 November 2014, Monday 53 16 82 35
4 November 2014, Tuesday 261 1 23 112
Total 704 446 803 414