Nativism, civic nationalism and the malleability of voter attitudes

Abstract

Nativism is one of the defining phenomena of the contemporary era. Yet, we know little about how malleable citizen attitudes associated with nativism and nationalism are to priming effects when media frames which deal with key issues such as immigration are introduced. In this article, we present the findings from a survey experiment fielded to a nationally representative sample of voters in Australia in May 2019. In it, we explore whether the attitudes of voters for different political parties can be primed by introducing two contrasting media frames to measure these effects. We find positive and negative frames have no effect on the attitudes of voters for Australia’s populist radical right party, but that the former has an effect on centre-right voters in Australia. Such findings have important implications for our understanding of political communication and the malleability of political attitudes.