The Globalization of Social Cues: Trump's 2016 Victory Shaped the Salience of Immigration in Europe

Journal article, 2026

How did the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 shape the salience of immigration in Europe? While previous research has documented transatlantic attitudinal spillovers, we know less about how such developments shape the salience of political issues. This study addresses this gap by leveraging individual-level data from the ESS and the SOM Institute, using the election as an Unexpected Event during Survey Design. Employing regression discontinuity and embedding regression techniques, we analyze attitudinal change as well as open-ended survey responses to the “most important issue” question to assess the election's effect on immigration salience. Our findings confirm previous work and show subgroup variations in the attitudinal effects of the election by different party groups, where authoritarian voters exhibit the largest liberalizing shift. Turning to salience, the text-based embedding analyses point to a significant shift in issue engagement, driven primarily by an increase among authoritarian voters, a pattern also evident, though more weakly, in the hand-coded data. Taken together, authoritarian voters became simultaneously more liberal in their immigration attitudes and more engaged with the issue. The findings underscore the importance of analytically distinguishing between attitudes and salience, illustrate how measurement choice can shape conclusions about salience, and demonstrate how major global political events can reshape the importance of specific political issues.