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.

Do 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 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,

UKIP grew in popularity, with success in local and European elections, and then took 12.6% of the vote at the 2015 general election. It began to decline after the UK voted to leave the European Union.

We then merged this with information with people’s political support for UKIP in Waves 5-7 and 9-10 of Understanding Society, based on the questions “which political party [are you] closest to” and “If there were to be a general election tomorrow, which political party do you think you would be most likely to support?” We matched each date in the TNI with Understanding Society interviews which took place the following day, based on the assumption that people’s preferences are influenced by the latest news, which we defined as the stories which came out the previous day.

We also combined our TNI with data from the Global Terrorism Database, because it’s possible that there is coverage of terror attacks on days when no attack has actually happened – and we wanted to be sure that it was the news coverage people were reacting to. We found that the effect we saw was indeed driven by media representation of the terror-related events, rather than the events themselves.

What we found

There is a clear correlation between the TNI and the likelihood of people saying that they will vote for UKIP.

If we look at particular subgroups, there is a very strong effect of the TNI. People over 60 and born in the UK, for example, are 6.6% more likely to vote UKIP than the sample as a whole. For unemployed men with lower levels of education, it’s even higher (although this group represents a small sample size).

Incidentally, it’s interesting to look in more detail at how people say they will vote – because it’s not the same as how they actually vote. We examined people’s intentions in the last wave of Understanding Society before the 2015 election and their answers to the question “party voted for in the last general election” between the polls in May 2015 and June 2017. This showed that just 45% of people who said they would support UKIP actually voted for them in 2015. By comparison, just over 80% of those who said they would vote Conservative did so, and just under 70% of those who said Labour. The UKIP figure was similar to that for the Liberal Democrats (just under 49%). Of those who said they would vote UKIP, 25% actually voted Conservative, with 10% voting Labour and under 3% going Lib-Dem. In the end, 14% of UKIP supporters didn't vote for anyone.

Our conclusions

Just as previous research has shown a link between voters’ anti-immigrant attitudes and the physical presence of refugees, we found evidence that news related to terror in the context of the Syrian crisis can increase support for right-wing populism. We hope there will be research in future which looks at whether the tone of news coverage is important as a mechanism by which stories influence people’s political views – and whether trust in the media is a factor, too.

This article was originally published on the Understanding Society blog and is reproduced here with thanks.

Reading and resources

News about ISIS – a boost for UKIP? (Understanding Society Blog)

Terror headlines and voting (CPC Working Paper 98)