Does Eurosceptic and Anti-immigration News Exposure Trigger Populist Attitudes and Anti-immigration Beliefs? Evidence from a Longitudinal and Cross-country Perspective

Media attention for right-wing populist parties and their ideas has been regarded as an important factor explaining their recent electoral success (Aalberg et al., 2017; Hameleers et al., 2017; Mazzoleni et al., 2003). Arguably, the media devote disproportionate attention to the views and political agendas of right-wing populists – without critically scrutinizing their viewpoints. Therefore, right-wing populist viewpoints may become more mainstream and normalized in public opinion, which in turn increases the electoral success of right-wing populists. In support of this media logic argument, experimental (Bos et al., 2020; Hameleers et al., 2017; Matthes & Schmuck, 2017) and panel survey studies (Müller et al., 2017) offered evidence for a causal link between news exposure portraying elites and/or out-groups in a negative way and stronger populist worldviews among citizens. Yet, extant research on the link between news exposure and populist worldviews may lack ecological validity – and overestimate the perseverance of populist media diets in high-choice information settings. Against this backdrop, we propose that the link between media coverage and right-wing populist support is more subtle: News outlets may devote more attention to the issues owned by right-wing populists (i.e., anti-EU and anti-immigration agendas) which may activate congruent populist attitudes among people selecting such content. In a reciprocal relationship, these attitudes motivate subsequent selective exposure to news content covering right-wing populist issues that have become more mainstream and normalized in Western democracies over the years. To study these dynamics, we pose the following research question: Does exposure to Eurosceptic and anti-immigration news coverage fuel anti-immigration and populist attitudes among European citizens? With this study, we aim to offer a comprehensive empirical test of the reciprocal relationship between selecting and consuming negative news toward the EU and immigrants and populist and anti-immigration worldviews in society. Although extant literature has discussed the assumption that right-wing populist support in various nations is fueled by a media agenda that resonates with right-wing populist views (e.g., Mazzoleni et al., 2003), we know very little to what extent such a causal relationship exists when looking at two key issues owned by the populist right-wing in Europe. As main contribution, we reveal how exposure to negative media coverage on the EU and immigrants may ignite support for right-wing populist ideologies. For our analyses, we link detailed manual content data (in terms of content and outlets) and panel survey data collected between September 2017 and June 2019 that both stem from a large international research project. We combine two analytical approaches. To tease out the causal link between news exposure and attitudes, we focus on the case of the Netherlands, for which we collected six panel waves and respective news content data in the months before these waves. In order to strengthen the generalizability of the relationship, we focus on the time period between April and June 2019, during which we collected two panel waves for another set of eight countries (complete list: DE, DK, ES, FR, GR, HU, NL, PL, SE).