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How terrorism affects our language and the vote for the radical right

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The experience of the jihadist terrorist attacks that plagued Western Europe between 2015 and 2017 shows that perceived threats from ethnic and religious minorities affect the tone of public discourse about immigration and the support for radical right parties, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Political Science, which uses German data, including more than 10 million tweets.
The experience of the jihadist terrorist attacks that plagued Western Europe between 2015 and 2017 shows that perceived threats from ethnic and religious minorities affect the tone of public discourse about immigration and the support for radical right parties, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Political Science, which uses German data, including more than 10 million tweets.

In that period, terrorist attacks and instances of crime involving minorities made immigration a more salient issue for voters, explain Bocconi scholars Francesco Giavazzi (Department of Economics) and Gaia Rubera (Department of Marketing), with former Bocconi students Felix Iglhaut (now at the LSE Ph.D. program) and Giacomo Lemoli (now at the New York University Ph.D. program) as co-authors. This induced German Twitter users to tweet more frequently, and with a worsening sentiment, about immigration and Muslims, thus making the language used by the public on Twitter more similar to the language used by the radical right party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), which was pointing to the open border policy as posing a security threat for the German population.

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