Credibility and/or anxiety - The moderators of political information on migration

In the policy of migration information campaigns Western governments aim to influence perceptions on irregular migration in potential sending countries. While information campaigns are called the ‘ethical part’ of Western border politics, critical research literature questions their legitimacy due to anxiety-inducing messages, and the (lacking) credibility of Western implementers in the Global South. Drawing on dual-process theories from Psychology, and literature on credibility and emotions in politics, I expect that information provision moderated by anxiety and/or credibility are equally performing an information updating by enhancing the perception of the prevalence of irregular migration, but via different theoretical frames. To disentangle the independent and interdependent effects, I conducted a field experiment with two independent treatments in a real European migration information campaign reaching 2612 Nigerians. The overall information-effect results reveal an increased perception of irregular migration prevalence in ones surrounding, and a decrease in commonality of irregular migration when attributed to oneself. The moderators, credibility and anxiety, achieve similar levels per moderator and jointly but for distinct outcomes. If the credibility of the sender is assured, the perception of general topic prevalence is increased and only slightly changes the self-estimate, while anxiety-triggering enhances the self-attribution, i.e. own commonness of irregular migration and less so a general prevalence perception. The results support the two distinct paths of the theoretical dual-process framework. Additionally, by providing causal and multi-treatment evidence, this study contributes to a normative debate on the practical implementation of a migration policy, its purpose, and techniques in information transmission more broadly.