News about ISIS – a boost for UKIP? Based on their recent CPC Working Paper on terror headlines and voting, CPC Researchers Dr Armine Ghazaryan, Professor Corrado Giulietti and Professor Jackie Wahba from the University of Southampton wrote a blog post for Understanding Society sharing their findings.
D
o headlines about terrorism increase support for right-wing populism? Wars create refugees, as anyone watching the news this year can testify. With a new conflict unfolding in Europe, the Syrian civil war which began in 2011 has been all but forgotten, but it’s still going on, and still creating refugees of its own. We know from research into this earlier conflict that an increase in refugee numbers contributes to a rise in support for right-wing populist parties and the far right. One of the fears people have about refugees is that they might not be genuine, and might be using the opportunity to get into a country and carry out terrorist attacks. With that idea in mind, we wanted to look at the Syrian civil war from a different angle, and find out
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whether news coverage of ISIS and terrorism in the context of the Syrian crisis can influence support for England’s main right-wing populist party, UKIP. How we used the data We began by creating the Terror News Index, which measures the frequency of headlines about Islamic State (aka ISIS) and terrorism in the context of the Syrian crisis. We chose three outlets which span the British political spectrum (the BBC, the Guardian and the Daily Mail), and examined the number of news stories about terrorism each day compared to the total daily number of all news stories. The Terror News Index (TNI) has spikes in 2014, when the Islamic State group was at its height, and declines after 2016, with a peak in late 2019 on the death of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Over the same period,
