Violence Against Politicians, Negative Campaigning, and Public Opinion: Evidence from Poland

Krzysztof Krakowski, Juan Morales and Dani Sandu

Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: It is commonly viewed that violence against politicians increases support for the victim’s party. We revisit this conjecture drawing on evidence from an assas- sination of an opposition politician in Poland. First, we analyze engagement with Twitter content posted by opposition and government politicians using a difference- in-differences framework. Second, we use a public opinion survey collected in the days around the attack, and compare party preferences of respondents interviewed just before and respondents interviewed just after the attack. Our results reveal de- creased support for the victim’s (opposition) party relative to support for the govern- ment. To explain this finding, we show that the opposition antagonized the public by engaging in negative campaigning against the government over their politician’s assas- sination. Content analysis of tweets and news media confirms that citizens punished the opposition for their negative campaigning after the violence. Tentative evidence suggests that these effects could have had long-run political consequences.

Keywords: violence; public opinion; negative campaigning; Poland; social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67 pages
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.carloalberto.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/no.624.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cca:wpaper:624

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().