Representation of Islam and Muslims – A Comparison of People’s Mind and Media Coverage

Over the last decades political conflicts related to the integration of immigrants and their religion, especially Islam, have been growing in most Western European countries. The share of Muslims in the populations of these countries hardly exceeded 7% in 2016 (8.8% in France, Pew Research 2017), but their number is consistently overestimated (IPSOS MORI Perils of Perception 2016). Moreover, Muslims and their faith are perceived as violent, extreme, and incompatible with liberal principles of Western democracies. However, where do these perceptions come from? Since only few individuals have direct contact with Muslims, the media become a central source of information. Consequently, media representations of Muslims and Islam influence, among other factors, how people think about them. This paper therefore focuses specifically on (re)presentations of Islam and Muslims in people’s mind and the media and thereby goes beyond previous research by linking media content with people’s attitudes. Building on the attribute agenda-setting approach, the paper compares both the salience of affective (positive vs. negative) and cognitive attributes (e.g., economic, cultural and security-related aspects) in the mass media coverage on Muslims and Islam with the associations in individuals’ minds. The analysis combines two datasets: a representative survey conducted in Switzerland in 2019 that provides information on respondents’ associations with the issue (an open-end question) as well as media use, and an automated content analysis of media coverage in the six months preceding the survey. We use topic modelling and sentiment analysis to identify potential cognitive and affective attributes. The paper concludes by discussing to which extent the (re)presentations of Islam and Muslims in the media and peoples’ mind are linked to more general and stable attitudes towards immigration as well as political preferences.