Basile Blanc at the RITM Economics Seminar

Abstract: This paper analyzes whether local news coverage of immigration, rather than the presence of immigrants, drives support for the far right. I use the 2015–2016 dismantling of the Calais “Jungle,” which dispersed asylum seekers into small reception centers across France, as a natural experiment. Exploiting the fixed distribution boundaries of the local editions of  Ouest-France, France’s largest daily newspaper, I compare communes a few kilometers apart that receive the same national, regional, and departmental news but different local coverage of the same nearby opening. A geographic regression discontinuity design along these editorial boundaries shows that the far-right vote share grew by about 1.7 percentage points more between 2012 and 2017 on the higher-coverage side. This gain is mirrored primarily by a decline in mainstream-right support and is attenuated near reception centers, where direct contact is more plausible. Because the corpus is overwhelmingly sympathetic and contains little hostile coverage, the findings leave little scope for a conventional fear-based mechanism. Instead, they are consistent with a salience mechanism: local news shifts votes by making immigration visible and locally concrete.