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

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 countrie...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:EPJ data science 2020-05, Vol.9 (1), p.12-27, Article 12
Main Authors: Koch, Caleb M., Moise, Izabela, Helbing, Dirk, Donnay, Karsten
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Asylum acceptance rates
Complexity
Computer Appl. in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Computer Science
Data science
Data-driven Science
Economic factors
Empirical analysis
Geneva Conventions
Granger-causality
Human rights
International organizations
Modeling and Theory Building
Politics
Public debate in the media
Refugees
Regular Article
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2193-1127
2193-1127
DOI:10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00229-8