Terrorist Attacks, Cultural Incidents and the Vote for Radical Parties: Analyzing Text from Twitter / Francesco Giavazzi, Felix Iglhaut, Giacomo Lemoli, Gaia Rubera.

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Giavazzi, Francesco

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w26825.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: We study the role of perceived threats from other cultures induced by terrorist attacks and by a criminal event on public discourse and voters' support for radical right parties. We first develop a rule which allocates Twitter users in Germany to electoral districts and then use a machine learning method to compute measures of textual similarity between the tweets they produce and tweets by accounts of the main German parties. Using the dates of the exogenous events we estimate constituency-level shifts in similarity to party language. We find that following these events Twitter text becomes on average more similar to that of the main radical right party, AfD, while the opposite happens for other parties. Regressing estimated shifts in similarity on changes in vote shares between federal elections we find a significant association. Our results point to the role of perceived threats from other cultures on the success of nationalist parties.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w26825 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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March 2020.

We study the role of perceived threats from other cultures induced by terrorist attacks and by a criminal event on public discourse and voters' support for radical right parties. We first develop a rule which allocates Twitter users in Germany to electoral districts and then use a machine learning method to compute measures of textual similarity between the tweets they produce and tweets by accounts of the main German parties. Using the dates of the exogenous events we estimate constituency-level shifts in similarity to party language. We find that following these events Twitter text becomes on average more similar to that of the main radical right party, AfD, while the opposite happens for other parties. Regressing estimated shifts in similarity on changes in vote shares between federal elections we find a significant association. Our results point to the role of perceived threats from other cultures on the success of nationalist parties.