Tabloid Media and Eurosceptic Attitudes - A Quasi-experiment on Media Influence

• In Event: Information, Media and Policy Attitudes in a Populist Age

Abstract

Are changes in citizens’ attitudes towards EU-integration endogenous to campaigns by tabloid media outlets? The question to what extent public opinion is a consequence, rather than a cause of media reports is difficult to answer because citizens self-select into media consumption. We use a unique quasi-experiment in the United Kingdom – the widespread boycott of the most important right-wing tabloid newspaper, the Sun, in Merseyside county as a direct consequence of the Sun’s reporting on the 1989 Hillsborough soccer disaster – to identify the effects of reading the Sun on attitudes towards leaving the EU. Using a difference-in-differences design based on British Social Attitudes data spanning the years from 1983 to 1996, we show that this specific event caused a sharp drop in Sun readership in Merseyside. We also show that attitudes towards the EU got significantly more positive in Merseyside during the boycott, compared to attitudes of respondents in other English regions. We estimate that this effect amounts to around 11 percentage-points. The results of this paper have important implications for our understanding of media effects, and suggest that the tabloid media played a role in influencing attitudes towards leaving the EU.

Authors

• Florian Foos, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Daniel Bischof, University of Zurich