To understand public opinion about immigration in Europe, one has to understand the media's role in it. We present a literature review on research on media discourse on immigration and their effects. Despite differences in the way immigration and migrant groups are represented in European media, we can observe common patterns. Migrants are generally under-represented and shown as delinquents or criminals. Although, media framing differs based on specific migrant groups the discourse is focusing on, immigration coverage is often negative and conflict-centred. Frequent exposure to such media messages leads to negative attitudes towards migration, may activate stereotypical cognitions of migrant groups, and even influence vote choice. In addition to discussing these issues in depth, the present review also focuses on comparative findings.

Why are COVID-19 conspiracy theories so prevalent? Particularly, why would some citizens ignore scientific evidence and common logic but, instead, be convinced that COVID-19 was a military experiment or spread by 5G signals? Why would they believe that Bill Gates had anything to do with it? In this contribution, we argue that populism is at the centre of these beliefs, as the complex nature of the COVID-19 pandemic makes it an ideal playground for populists' opposition to scientific and political elites. We use Structural Equation Models and panel survey data (n = 823) from the Austrian Corona Panel Project to test this argument. We demonstrate a negative correlation of populist attitudes with both trust in political and scientific institutions, which, in return, negatively relate to COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs. This results in an overall positive relationship of populist attitudes and conspiracy beliefs that is independent of political ideology. These findings have important implications for elite communication regarding virus mitigation.

Bias in political news coverage may have a profound influence on voter opinions and preferences. However, the concept of media bias actually encompasses different subtypes: Visibility bias is the salience of political actors, tonality bias the evaluation of these actors, and agenda bias the extent to which parties address preferred issues in media coverage. The present study is the first to explore how each type of bias influences party preferences. Using data from the Austrian parliamentary election campaign of 2013, we combine an online panel survey (n = 1,285) with measures of media bias from content analyses of party press releases (n = 1,922) and media coverage in eight newspapers (n = 6,970). We find substantial effects on party preferences for tonality bias and agenda bias, while visibility bias has no clear impact. Voters who are less politically sophisticated and lack a party identification are more susceptible to bias, and media bias can also reinforce existing partisan identities.

Systematic and openly accessible data are vital to the scientific understanding of the social, political, and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article introduces the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP), which has generated a unique, publicly available data set from late March 2020 onwards. ACPP has been designed to capture the social, political, and economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the Austrian population on a weekly basis. The thematic scope of the study covers several core dimensions related to the individual and societal impact of the COVID-19 crisis. The panel survey has a sample size of approximately 1500 respondents per wave. It contains questions that are asked every week, complemented by domain-specific modules to explore specific topics in more detail. The article presents details on the data collection process, data quality, the potential for analysis, and the modalities of data access pertaining to the first ten waves of the study.

The complexity and duration of the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ created a climate of uncertainty, which left ample room for mass media to shape citizens’ understanding of what the arrival of these refugees meant for their respective country. This study analyses the national media discourses in Hungary, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Spain for this time period. Applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling in five languages and based on N = 130,042 articles from 24 news outlets, we reveal country-specific media frames to track the overall course of the refugee debate and to uncover dynamics and shifts in discourses. While results show similarities across countries, due to media coverage responding to real-world developments, there are differences in media framing as well. Possible sources of these differences such as countries’ geographic location or status as receiving country are discussed.