IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ifowps/_402.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Topic Salience and Political Polarization: Evidence from the German “PISA shock”

Author

Listed:
  • Pietro Sancassani

Abstract

Does the salience of a topic affect polarization in related parliamentary debates? When discussing a salient topic, politicians might adopt more extreme stances to gain electoral consensus. Alternatively, they could converge towards more moderate positions to find a compromise. Using parliamentary debates from the 16 German state parliaments, I exploit the exogenous increase in the salience of education induced by the unexpectedly low performance of German students in the PISA 2000 test—the German “PISA shock”. I combine machine-learning and text analysis techniques to obtain topic-specific measures of polarization of parliamentary debates. In a difference-in-differences framework, I find that the PISA shock caused an 8.8% of a standard deviation increase in polarization of education debates compared to other topics. The effect is long-lasting and fades after about six years.

Suggested Citation

  • Pietro Sancassani, 2023. "Topic Salience and Political Polarization: Evidence from the German “PISA shock”," ifo Working Paper Series 402, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ifowps:_402
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/wp-2023-402-sancassani-topic-salience.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David Autor & David Dorn & Gordon Hanson & Kaveh Majlesi, 2020. "Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(10), pages 3139-3183, October.
    2. Stefano DellaVigna & Ethan Kaplan, 2007. "The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 122(3), pages 1187-1234.
    3. Adam Bonica, 2013. "Ideology and Interests in the Political Marketplace," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 57(2), pages 294-311, April.
    4. Anthony Downs, 1957. "An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 65, pages 135-135.
    5. Davoli, Maddalena & Entorf, Horst, 2018. "The PISA Shock, Socioeconomic Inequality, and School Reforms in Germany," IZA Policy Papers 140, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. David Autor & David Dorn & Gordon Hanson & Kaveh Majlesi, 2020. "Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(10), pages 3139-3183, October.
    2. Marco Manacorda & Guido Tabellini & Andrea Tesei, 2022. "Mobile Internet and the Rise of Political Tribalism in Europe," Working Papers 941, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.
    3. Schnellenbach, Jan & Schubert, Christian, 2015. "Behavioral political economy: A survey," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 40(PB), pages 395-417.
    4. Paul Vertier, 2018. "The democratic challenges of electoral representation and populism : an empirical approach [Les défis démocratiques de la représentation électorale et du populisme : une approche empirique]," SciencePo Working papers Main tel-03419534, HAL.
    5. Jo Thori Lind & Dominic Rohner, 2017. "Knowledge is Power: A Theory of Information, Income and Welfare Spending," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 84(336), pages 611-646, October.
    6. Francesco Drago & Tommaso Nannicini & Francesco Sobbrio, 2014. "Meet the Press: How Voters and Politicians Respond to Newspaper Entry and Exit," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 6(3), pages 159-188, July.
    7. Federico Vaccari, 2023. "Influential news and policy-making," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 76(4), pages 1363-1418, November.
    8. Anand, Kartik & Gai, Prasanna & König, Philipp Johann, 2020. "Leaping into the dark: A theory of policy gambles," Discussion Papers 07/2020, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    9. Thiemo Fetzer & Carlo Schwarz, 2021. "Tariffs and Politics: Evidence from Trump’s Trade Wars," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 131(636), pages 1717-1741.
    10. Rode, Martin & Sáenz de Viteri, Andrea, 2018. "Expressive attitudes to compensation: The case of globalization," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 42-55.
    11. Borgschulte, Mark & Cho, Heepyung & Lubotsky, Darren, 2022. "Partisanship and survey refusal," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 200(C), pages 332-357.
    12. Alexander Dyck & Natalya Volchkova & Luigi Zingales, 2008. "The Corporate Governance Role of the Media: Evidence from Russia," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(3), pages 1093-1135, June.
    13. Martijn J. Burger & Susanna Eiselt, 2023. "Subjective Well-Being and Populist Voting in the Netherlands," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 24(7), pages 2331-2352, October.
    14. Caroline Le Pennec & Vincent Pons, 2019. "How Do Campaigns Shape Vote Choice? Multi-Country Evidence from 62 Elections and 56 TV Debates," NBER Working Papers 26572, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Mathieu Couttenier & Sophie Hatte & Mathias Thoenig & Stephanos Vlachos, 2019. "The Logic of Fear: Populism and Media Coverage of Immigrant Crimes," Working Papers halshs-02095658, HAL.
    16. Archishman Chakraborty & Parikshit Ghosh, 2016. "Character Endorsements and Electoral Competition," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 8(2), pages 277-310, May.
    17. Mikael Elinder, 2012. "Correcting mistakes: cognitive dissonance and political attitudes in Sweden and the United States," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 153(1), pages 235-249, October.
    18. Draca, Mirko & Schwarz, Carlo, 2019. "How Polarized are Citizens? Measuring Ideology from the Ground-Up," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1218, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    19. Piolatto, Amedeo & Schuett, Florian, 2015. "Media competition and electoral politics," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 80-93.
    20. Garcia Pires, Armando J., 2014. "Media diversity, advertising, and adaptation of news to readers’ political preferences," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 28(C), pages 28-38.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Polarization; text analysis; machine learning; Germany; PISA shock;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ifowps:_402. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifooode.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.