In this paper, we take a novel approach to study the empirical relationship between public debate in the media and asylum acceptance rates in Europe from 2002–2016. In theory, an asylum seeker should experience the same likelihood of being granted refugee status from each of the 20 European countries we study. Yet, in practice, acceptance rates vary widely for nearly every asylum country of origin. We address this inconsistency with a data-driven approach by analyzing refugee-related news articles and data on asylum decisions across 20 Europe countries for more than 100 asylum seekers’ countries of origin. We find that: (i) public debate sentiment in the media is strongly associated with European countries’ diverging asylum practices, much more so than social, cultural or economic factors, and (ii) by combining different measures of public debate we can make out-of-sample predictions within 3% of true acceptance rates (on average). We conclude by discussing the practical implications of our findings for European asylum practices.

中文翻译：

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媒体的公开辩论很重要：欧洲难民危机的证据

在本文中，我们采用一种新颖的方法来研究媒体公开辩论与2002-2016年欧洲庇护接受率之间的经验关系。从理论上讲，寻求庇护者应该经历从我们研究的20个欧洲国家中获得难民身份的可能性相同。然而，实际上，几乎每个庇护原籍国的接受率都有很大差异。我们通过分析与难民有关的新闻文章和有关100多个寻求庇护者原籍国的20个欧洲国家的庇护决定的数据，以数据驱动的方法解决了这种不一致的情况。我们发现：（i）媒体的公开辩论情绪与欧洲国家不同的庇护做法紧密相关，远不只是社会，文化或经济因素，（ii）通过结合不同的公开辩论方式，我们可以在真实接受率（平均）的3％之内做出样本外预测。最后，我们讨论了我们的发现对欧洲避难实践的实际意义。