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

Pietro Sancassani

No 402, ifo Working Paper Series from ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich

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.

Keywords: Polarization; text analysis; machine learning; Germany; PISA shock (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-ger and nep-mac
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