Terrorist Attacks, Cultural Incidents and the Vote for Radical Parties: Analyzing Text from Twitter

Francesco Giavazzi, Giacomo Lemoli, Gaia Rubera and Felix Iglhaut

No 14455, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study the role of perceived threats from cultural diversity induced by terrorist attacks and a salient criminal event on public discourse and voters' support for far-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 aforementioned 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 far-right party, AfD, while the opposite happens for some of the 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 on the success of nationalist parties.

Keywords: National elections; Political parties; Text analysis; Social media; Terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C45 D72 H56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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