Ready or not. National identity, vote choice, and mass media: Evidence from Germany

Exploiting the increased prominence of debates on immigration, right-wing parties often frame and campaign against immigrants as a threat to national societies. Research on national identity has shown that these parties are particularly successful among voters with an ethnically charged, exclusionary conception of nation. National identity, however, tends to be rather latent and stable, while far-right voting is much more volatile. Explaining a temporal influence of national identity on political behavior, social-psychological theories argue that identities need to be activated to become behaviorally relevant. The main argument of this article is that the presence of immigration-related news in the mass media can serve as such a situational factor for thinking about the nation and thus increase its salience for electoral behavior. Combining individual-level panel data from the German Longitudinal Election Study's Short-term Campaign Panel (GLES, 2019) with a measure of media salience of immigration-related news in news articles, this study is the first to examine whether national identity can be activated for political behavior through the salience of immigration-related issues in the mass media using panel data.