Public Governance workshop

2025-03-17 at 17:30h

Matteo Grigoletto (University of Bern)

Censorship in Democracy (with Marcel Caesman, Janis Goldzycher and Lorenz Gschwent)

Abstract: The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and biased narratives from autocratic regimes, especially on social media, is a growing concern in many democracies. Can censorship be an effective tool to curb the spread of such slanted narratives? In this paper, we study the European Union’s ban on Russian state-led news outlets after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We analyze 775,616 tweets from 133,276 users on Twitter/X, employing a difference-in-differences strategy. We show that the ban reduced pro-Russian slant among users who had previously directly interacted with banned outlets. The impact is most pronounced among users with the highest pre-ban slant levels. However, this effect was short-lived, with slant returning to its pre-ban levels within two weeks post-enforcement. Additionally, we find a detectable albeit less pronounced indirect effect on users who had not directly interacted with the outlets before the ban. We provide evidence that other suppliers of propaganda may have actively sought to mitigate the ban’s influence by intensifying their activity, effectively counteracting the persistence and reach of the ban.

2025-03-10 at 17:30h

Hannes Mueller (Barcelona School of Economics)

Breaking the Echo-chamber: Social Media Networks and Political Conflict

Abstract: Social media platforms play a crucial role in shaping public discourse and political conflict. But political conflict also shapes behavior on social media. This paper investigates the response of social media users to political events during the height of the independence struggle in 2017 in Catalonia (Spain). The analysis exploits linguistic markers to study retweets within and across Catalan and Castellano language groups in a large Twitter corpus of 26 million tweets during this conflict. To be able to study changes in retweet behavior, the article proposes a statistical decomposition into ‘exposure’—the likelihood of encountering specific content—and ‘retweet rates’—the probability of retweeting content once exposed. Surprisingly, the political events were associated with a dramatic relative increase in retweet rates across language groups and a corresponding explosion of exposure. There is evidence of a realignment, where left-wing content from both language groups was spread more strongly in the other language group.

2025-02-24 at 17:30h

Aakaash Rao (Harvard University)

Politicians, News Media, and the Culture War (with Shakked Noy)

Abstract: We show that US politicians’ campaign advertisements between 2000 and 2020 are dominated by economic issues such as jobs and taxes, and rarely mention divisive cultural topics such as immigration, abortion, and guns. In contrast, we find that cultural topics dominate political news coverage, particularly cable news. Politicians underperform electorally when they emphasize cultural rather than economic issues, whereas news outlets attract larger audiences when they cover cultural rather than economic topics. We explain these differences in part through a difference in objectives: politicians maximize their vote share, whereas news outlets maximize their audience size. Linking campaign ads with individual voting decisions and high-frequency variation in TV news content with household-level viewership responses, we show that economic content is better for share-maximization and cultural content is better for size-maximization: economic content disproportionately attracts swing voters or swing viewers who would otherwise choose a politician’s or news outlet’s competitor, while cultural content disproportionately mobilizes individuals who would otherwise not vote or not view news. The media’s cultural focus spills over into politics: voters in constituencies exogenously more exposed to cable news weight cultural issues more heavily, and local politicians supply more cultural ads. Estimating a model of political competition and media choice, we show that the entry of cable news channels in the 1990s can explain 40% of the subsequent increase in cultural polarization.

2025-02-10 at 17:30h

Marcel Caesmann (University of Zurich)

Going Viral: Protests and Polarization in 1932 Hamburg (joint with Bruno Caprettini, Joachim Voth and David Yanagizawa-Drott)

Abstract: Political polarization is a growing concern in many countries. Are mass protests merely a sign of increasing cleavages, or do they polarize societies? In this paper, we estimate the impact of Nazi marches in 1932 Hamburg, using granular data from 622 voting precincts during 6 elections. We show propaganda can convince – but it does so the most in areas with high initial support. Importantly, marches can also backfire, repelling voters. Thus, protest matches lead to polarization. These effects diffused through social networks, measured as contagion patterns across neighborhoods from the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak. The electoral effects of social spillovers are of similar importance as direct exposure, and grow over time.

2025-01-26 at 17:30h

Viktor Malein (Lund University)

Economic Modernisation and Democratization: Evidence from 1917 Russian Revolution

Abstract: This paper examines how exposure to successful democratic institutions influences subsequent electoral support for constitutional order. It leverages a historical quasi-experimental setting: the 1864 Zemstvo reform, which introduced spatial variation within the Russian Empire in access to democratic institutions. The reform established local self-governments, allowing various social groups, including former serfs, to participate in local elections and elect officials to local assemblies. Additionally, Zemstvo institutions played a key role in expanding public goods provision, such as primary schooling and healthcare. Using population census data, the paper exploits variation across cohorts over time, demonstrating that those exposed to the reform experienced significant gains in human capital and occupational choice. By employing a spatial regression discontinuity design and analyzing the results of the 1917 Constitutional Assembly Elections, the paper shows that the literate population in Zemstvo regions, who benefited from public goods provision, increased electoral support for liberal parties (Constitutional Democrats). The findings highlight the mutually reinforcing relationship between support for liberal democracy and economic progress, which benefits broad segments of the population.

2024-09-16 at 17:30h

Yaroslav Prokhorskoy (ESSEC)

Beneath the Ban of Abortion: Evidence from the USSR (with Sultan Mehmood and Hosny Zoabi)

Abstract: Capitalizing on a policy discontinuity created by Stalin's abrupt ban on abortions in 1936, this paper provides evidence of the demographic and public health consequences of restricting abortions using newly digitized archival documents from the Soviet Union. Our difference-in-differences and IV estimates indicate a substantial increase in birth rates post-ban on abortions, aligning with Soviet objectives for population growth. However, the ban on abortions coincided with a substantial increase in infant mortality—a linkage oft insinuated but seldom demonstrated causally. Subsequent scrutiny of recently declassified criminal records from the Soviet Union on illegal abortions indicates that regions with high abortion rates pre-ban show a distinct uptick in illegal abortions and a rise in female deaths directly related to abortions. Female deaths not directly related to abortions are unaffected.

2024-05-06 at 17:30h

Lena Song (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Making Public Law (joint with Elliott Ash, Aniket Kesari, Suresh Naidu, and Dominik Stammbach)

Abstract: Laws have increasingly become difficult for the public to understand due to their complexity and the decline in trusted legal journalism. We build a novel AI-powered legal summarizer to produce easy-to-read summaries of the reasoning in judicial opinions. We study the effects of these summaries in three related experiments. First, we show in a survey experiment that, compared to existing expert-written summaries, AI-generated simple summaries of U.S. Supreme Court judicial opinions are more accessible to the public and more easily understood by non-experts. They help respondents understand the key features of a ruling, and have higher perceived quality, especially for respondents with less formal education. Second, we study how these summaries affect policy attitudes and institutional legitimacy in a large-scale survey experiment around the release of the affirmative action decision in June 2023. While the summaries enhance understanding of judicial opinions across issues, they have mixed effects on the acceptance of court decisions. Finally, we explore the effect of these summaries on public discourse in a social media experiment.

2024-03-18 at 17:30h

Gísli Gylfason (Paris School of Economics)

From Tweets to the Streets: Twitter and Extremist Protests in the United States

Abstract: How does social media affect the composition of political protests in the United States? Using early adoption of Twitter at the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival as a plausibly exogenous source of variation in county-level Twitter penetration (Muller & Schwarz, 2023), and comprehensive data on protest events, this paper finds that Twitter penetration increases the frequency of protests overall, but also radicalizes them. Twitter disproportionately fuels protests with participation of “extreme” groups—groups that are particularly militant, radical, or hateful. These effects do not depend on the topic of the protest nor political lean- ing. I also present survey evidence suggesting that coordination is not the only mechanism driving these results: An increase in county-level Twitter penetration implies an increase in respondent’s willingness to justify violence against other people, normalizing the participation in extreme groups and extreme protests.

2024-03-04 at 17:30h

Kai Gehring (University of Bern)

Analyzing Climate Change Policy Narratives with the Character-Role Narrative Framework (with Matteo Grigoletto)

Abstract: Understanding behavioral aspects of collective decision-making is an important challenge for eco- nomics, and narratives are a crucial group-based mechanism that influences human decision- making. This paper introduces the Character-Role Narrative Framework as a tool to systematically analyze narratives, and applies it to study US climate change policy on Twitter over the 2010- 2021 period. We build on the idea of the so-called drama triangle that suggests, within the context of a topic, the essence of a narrative is captured by its characters in one of three essential roles: hero, villain, and victim. We show how this intuitive framework can be easily integrated into an empirical pipeline and scaled up to large text corpora using supervised machine learning. In our application to US climate change policy narratives, we find strong changes in the frequency of simple and complex character-role narratives over time. Using contagiousness, popularity, and sparking conversation as three distinct dimensions of virality, we show that narratives that are simple, feature human characters and emphasize villains tend to be more viral. Focusing on Donald Trump as an example of a populist leader, we demonstrate that populism is linked to a higher share of such simple, human, and villain-focused narratives.

2024-02-12 at 17:30h

Masahiro Kubo (Brown University)

French (with Guillaume Blanc)

Abstract: This paper studies nation-building in a fragmented society. We document the adoption of a common language and the construction of a national identity in France. Using a natural experiment and drawing on a novel dataset on the languages spoken across municipalities on the eve of the twentieth century, we establish that state intervention in the provision of education brought homogenization. To understand why nation-building was successful, we study heterogeneity and find that elites and the demand for education were instrumental in driving assimilation. Finally, we document further impacts on identity and ideology in the twentieth century.

2024-01-29 at 17:30h

Agustina Martínez (University of Leicester)

Hate in the Tropics. Bolsonaro's Triumph and the Surge of Online Hate Speech in Brazil (with Diego Marino Fages)

Abstract: How does the advent of new information shape societal norms and, consequently, behavior? We delve into the aftermath of Bolsonaro's triumph in the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, examining its impact on the prevalence of online hate speech. Leveraging Twitter data spanning 2017 to 2019, we employ Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to distinguish tweets containing hate speech. To precisely trace the impact of Bolsonaro's election in online expressions of hate, we adopt a difference-in-differences methodology, utilizing the election outcome as an information shock. We observed a significant surge in instances of hate speech via Twitter after the elections. This phenomenon was particularly pronounced in municipalities where Bolsonaro's support was comparatively low. These results find reinforcement in the individual-level analysis, indicating that intensive and extensive margins of individual hate speech contributed to the overall increase. We interpret these findings through the lens of a belief updating mechanism, specifically emphasizing the process of revising social norms dictating what is deemed acceptable to say (or not) in public.

2023-12-04 at 17:30h

Ulrich Matter (University of St. Gallen's SEPS-HSG)

Who Owns the Online Media (with Philine Widmer)

Abstract: We examine the ownership structure and reach of thousands of news websites in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. By combining data on domain registrants, firm ownership, and domain-level web traffic, we draw detailed ownership networks behind news domains. We find that more than half of these websites have one ultimate owner. Otherwise, they tend to have highly diversified ownership structures, making it non-transparent as to who is ultimately responsible for the content. Moreover, the market concentration for online news is moderate to high and varies substantially across countries. Financial industry firms ultimately own substantial shares in the online news market.

2023-11-06 at 17:30h

Florencia Hnilo (Stanford University)

Scars of the Gestapo: Remembrance and Privacy Concerns

Abstract: We study how remembrance of an authoritarian regime impacts privacy concerns. Our main hypothesis is that Germany's culture of Holocaust remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) focuses Germans’ attention on the risks associated with private data ending up in the wrong hands. One example of this culture of remembrance are the Stolpersteine, plaques on the sidewalk signalling that a victim of Nazi persecution lived at a given address. We first use a detailed street-level imagery dataset of Berlin to relate the location of the Stolpersteine to a novel geolocated measure of privacy concerns: whether a person asks for their building to be blurred on a street-level imagery provider. We show that there exists a positive relationship between the amount of Stolpersteine near a person’s house or workplace, and the probability that this person will ask the imagery provider to blur the front of their house. This relationship is very localized, as most of the effect concentrates on Stolpersteine that are less than 10 meters away. We show through an experiment that when Germans are primed to think about the Stolpersteine and the Nazi Era, they respond by reading the experiment's consent form more thoroughly, which we take as another alternative measure of privacy concerns.

2023-10-23 at 17:30h

Kritika Saxena (University of Groningen)

Religiously-Inspired Baby Boom: Evidence from Georgia

Abstract: We study the impact of a change in the content of religious practice on fertility decisions. We do so in the context of the Georgian Orthodox Church, where in December 2007, in a move to reverse declining fertility rates, the church’s Patriarch began to personally baptise third- or higher-parity children. At the macro level, using a synthetic control method and interrupted time series analysis, we find suggestive evidence that Georgian fertility rates did rise in response to this intervention. We validate this result using microdata on fertility histories and religion from a representative sample of Georgian women, exploiting variation in religion, ethnicity, marital status, and prior parity to identify women exogenously treated by the patriarch’s campaign. We find that the baptism campaign significantly increased fertility for treated women (i.e. Georgian Orthodox women, especially if married). It also increased marriage and reduced reported abortion. All of these outcomes were desired targets of the intervention. Our results show that even in industrialized, educated, low-fertility societies, traditional authority figures making use of religious discourses may be able to influence fertility patterns.

2023-06-05 at 17:30h

Carlo Schwarz (Bocconi University)

The Effect of Content Moderation on Online and Offline Hate: Evidence from Germany's NetzDG

Abstract: Social media companies are under scrutiny for the prevalence of hateful content on their platforms, but there is scarce empirical evidence of the consequences of regulating such content. We study this question in the context of the ``Network Enforcement Act'' (NetzDG) in Germany, which mandates major social media companies to remove hateful posts within 24 hours. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the law was associated with a statistically significant reduction in toxic posts by far-right social media users. Further, we show that the NetzDG reduced anti-refugee hate crimes in towns with more far-right Facebook users. Together, these findings suggest that online content moderation can curb online hate speech and offline violence.

2023-04-17 at 17:30h

Apurav Bhatiya (University of Birmingham)

Do Enfranchised Immigrants Affect Politicians' Behaviour?

Abstract: Immigrants are a large and growing unenfranchised group across many developed countries. Does immigrants' enfranchisement affect how politicians respond to immigration? I study the unique UK context, where immigrants from Ireland and the Commonwealth have voting rights in all elections immediately upon arrival, but these rights are not accorded to other immigrants. I analyse how politicians discuss immigration using text analysis of the universe of speeches in the UK parliament and how MPs vote on immigration bills between 1972 and 2011. I use a shift-share instrument exploiting pre-existing settlement patterns to address immigrants' endogenous location choice. I find that politicians exposed to higher enfranchised immigration spend more time in the parliament discussing issues that affect immigrants positively, yet they vote to increase immigration restrictions. Enfranchisement leads to more political engagement of immigrants, and politicians respond to this engagement. The political cost of favouring enfranchised immigrants is compensated by restricting future immigration.

2023-03-20 at 17:30h

Léo Picard (University of Basel)

Political Metaphors in U.S. Governor Speeches (with Dominik Stammbach)

Abstract: How do politicians use metaphors in their speeches? To provide evidence on this question, we apply a deep-learning-based metaphor detection model to a historical corpus of annual State of the State speeches given by U.S. governors, ranging from 1995 to 2022. Across 9 socio-economic topics, we present the following descriptive findings. First, metaphors are most commonly used on fiscal and economic issues. Second, Democratic governors employ more metaphors on environmental issues relative to Republican governors, who in turn express more metaphors on moral values. Third, we confirm that the language used to express political metaphors is emotionally charged, with a degree of heterogeneity. Our emotion scores increase the most in presence of a metaphor on subjects related to the economy, fiscal issues, and moral values.

2023-02-20 at 17:30h

Peiyuan Li (University of Colorado Boulder)

Who Lost (or Won) China? Land Reform and War Mobilization

Abstract: Redistribution could be deliberately designed to trigger a civil war. How did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rally millions of farmers to win in 1949? The crucial step was to initiate land reform through class struggle, empowering farmers to violently grab land from landlords. Farmers desired land ownership but feared reprisals from landlords, who were backed by the Kuomintang (KMT) government. Therefore, farmers had to choose between joining the CCP's army to defend their land and free-riding. Adopting a Difference-in-Difference design and examining the death records of 566,161 communist soldiers, I find that for counties within 82 kilometers of KMT forces, a greater share of land redistribution to farmers encouraged farmers to fight, leading to a rise in CCP soldier deaths after land reform. However, for counties that were farther than 82 kilometers from KMT forces, a greater share of land transfer to farmers discouraged farmers from fighting (free-riding), resulting in fewer soldier deaths after land reform. A model of class struggle for land ownership explains the two different patterns. This paper develops a novel theory of war mobilization and partially explains the emergence of communism in the twentieth century.

2023-01-16 at 17:30h

Nikita Melnikov (Nova School of Business and Economics)

Mobile Internet and Political Polarization

Abstract: How has mobile internet affected political polarization in the United States? Using Gallup Daily Poll data covering 1,765,114 individuals in 31,499 ZIP codes between 2008 and 2017, I perform a difference-in-differences analysis and an instrumental-variable design to show that, after gaining access to 3G internet, Democratic voters became more liberal in their political views and increased their support for Democratic congressional candidates and policy priorities, while Republican voters shifted in the opposite direction. This increase in polarization largely did not take place among social media users. Instead, following the arrival of 3G, experienced internet and social media users from both parties became more pro-Democratic, whereas less-experienced users became more proRepublican. This divergence is partly driven by differences in news consumption between the two groups: after the arrival of 3G, experienced internet users decreased their consumption of Fox News, increased their consumption of CNN, and increased their political knowledge. Polarization also increased due to a political realignment of voters: wealthy, well-educated people became more liberal; poor, uneducated people—more conservative.

2022-12-05 at 17:30h

Gloria Gennaro (UCL)

Immigration and Social Distance: Evidence from Newspapers during the Age of Mass Migration

Abstract: By Alessandra Stampi-Bombelli, Gloria Gennaro, Elliott Ash, Dominik Hangartner A constant of human history is the migration of peoples in search of a better future. In destination countries, these new arrivals come into contact with both the host population as well as already established immigrant communities. How does the arrival of new immigrants affect the perception of outgroup distance among the native majority group? And do new arrivals also change the perceived distance between the host population and existing immigrant groups? We address these questions in the context of the Age of Mass Migration (1860-1920), a period during which sizeable and diverse groups of migrants arrived on U.S. shores. Applying advanced computational linguistics techniques to a newly processed corpus of over 1.8 million newspaper issues (9 million pages) published by 3,675 local outlets in that period, we present a novel text-based measure of perceived socio-cultural distance between U.S.-born natives and 32 immigrant groups. For each mention of an immigrant group, we compute a distance measure that captures whether the group's framing more closely resembles contexts used when portraying immigrants, rather than natives. We use this time- and county-varying outcome to analyse the short- and medium-term effects of immigration inflows on local perceptions of socio-cultural distance toward the arriving and existing immigrant groups.