IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/hal-03877943.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Corporate Donations and Political Rhetoric: Evidence from a National Ban

Author

Listed:
  • Julia Cagé

    (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research - CEPR)

  • Caroline Le Pennec

    (HEC Montréal - HEC Montréal)

  • Elisa Mougin

    (Sciences Po - Sciences Po, LIEPP - Laboratoire interdisciplinaire d'évaluation des politiques publiques (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po)

Abstract

Do campaign finance regulations influence politicians? We study the effects of a French ban on corporate donations passed in 1995. We use a difference-indifferences approach and a novel dataset combining the campaign manifestos issued by every candidate running for a seat in the French parliament with detailed data on their campaign contributions. We show that banning corporate donations discourages candidates from advertising their local presence during the campaign, as well as economic issues. The ban also leads candidates from non-mainstream parties to use more polarized language. These findings suggest that private donors shape politicians' topics of interest, and that campaign finance reforms may affect the information made available to voters through their impact on candidates' rhetoric.

Suggested Citation

  • Julia Cagé & Caroline Le Pennec & Elisa Mougin, 2021. "Corporate Donations and Political Rhetoric: Evidence from a National Ban," Working Papers hal-03877943, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03877943
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03877943
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03877943/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Caroline Le Pennec, 2020. "Strategic Campaign Communication: Evidence from 30,000 Candidate Manifestos," SoDa Laboratories Working Paper Series 2020-05, Monash University, SoDa Laboratories.
    2. Matthew Gentzkow & Jesse M. Shapiro & Matt Taddy, 2019. "Measuring Group Differences in High‐Dimensional Choices: Method and Application to Congressional Speech," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 87(4), pages 1307-1340, July.
    3. Matt Taddy, 2013. "Multinomial Inverse Regression for Text Analysis," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 108(503), pages 755-770, September.
    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. Hansen, Stephen & Davis, Steven & Seminario-Amez, Cristhian, 2020. "Firm-level Risk Exposures and Stock Returns in the Wake of COVID-19," CEPR Discussion Papers 15314, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Renáta Németh, 2023. "A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 6(1), pages 289-313, April.
    3. Caroline Le Pennec, 2020. "Strategic Campaign Communication: Evidence from 30,000 Candidate Manifestos," SoDa Laboratories Working Paper Series 2020-05, Monash University, SoDa Laboratories.
    4. Matthew Gentzkow & Bryan T. Kelly & Matt Taddy, 2017. "Text as Data," NBER Working Papers 23276, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Edoardo Cefalà, 2022. "The political consequences of mass repatriation," Discussion Papers 2022-05, University of Nottingham, GEP.
    6. Julia Cage & Edgard Dewitte, 2021. "It Takes Money to Make MPs: Evidence from 150 Years of British Campaign Spending," Sciences Po publications 2021-08, Sciences Po.
    7. Bryan T. Kelly & Asaf Manela & Alan Moreira, 2019. "Text Selection," NBER Working Papers 26517, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Robert J. Shiller, 2017. "Narrative Economics," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(4), pages 967-1004, April.
    9. Li, Zhaoyuan & Yao, Jianfeng, 2019. "Testing for heteroscedasticity in high-dimensional regressions," Econometrics and Statistics, Elsevier, vol. 9(C), pages 122-139.
    10. Matilde Bombardini & Bingjing Li & Francesco Trebbi, 2023. "Did US Politicians Expect the China Shock?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 113(1), pages 174-209, January.
    11. Monica Billio & Roberto Casarin & Matteo Iacopini, 2018. "Bayesian Markov Switching Tensor Regression for Time-varying Networks," Working Papers 2018:14, Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari".
    12. Aprigliano, Valentina & Emiliozzi, Simone & Guaitoli, Gabriele & Luciani, Andrea & Marcucci, Juri & Monteforte, Libero, 2023. "The power of text-based indicators in forecasting Italian economic activity," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 791-808.
    13. Nowak, Adam & Sayago-Gomez, Juan, 2018. "Homeowner preferences after September 11th, a microdata approach," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 330-351.
    14. Nicolas Berman & Björn Brey & Jérémy Laurent-Lucchetti, 2023. "Panic politics on the US West Coast," Discussion Papers 2023-06, Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP).
    15. Lockwood, Ben & Le, Minh & Rockey, James, 2021. "Dynamic Electoral Competition with Voter Loss-Aversion and Imperfect Recall," QAPEC Discussion Papers 12, Quantitative and Analytical Political Economy Research Centre.
    16. Nathan J. Canen & Chad Kendall & Francesco Trebbi, 2020. "Political Parties as Drivers of U.S. Polarization: 1927-2018," NBER Working Papers 28296, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Maria Carolina Cortes & Luis Vicente Gonzalez & Laura H. Gunn & Enrique ter Horst & German Molina & Silvia Restrepo & Juan Diego Zambrano, 2021. "Assessment of Research Topic Prevalence by Journal Impact Quartile in Oral Health Sciences Using Bayesian Methods," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(3), pages 21582440211, July.
    18. 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.
    19. Margaret E. Roberts & Brandon M. Stewart & Richard A. Nielsen, 2020. "Adjusting for Confounding with Text Matching," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 64(4), pages 887-903, October.
    20. Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski & Jérôme Valette, 2021. "Media Coverage of Immigration and the Polarization of Attitudes," PSE Working Papers halshs-03322229, HAL.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Elections; Campaign finance; Corporate donations; Campaign manifestos; Political rhetoric; Text analysis;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • P48 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Other Economic Systems - - - Legal Institutions; Property Rights; Natural Resources; Energy; Environment; Regional Studies
    • H7 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations

    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:hal:wpaper:hal-03877943. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.