Passing the partisan filter: Political narratives, partisan bias and opinions on public finances

Ekaterina Juergens () and Sebastian Gechert
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Ekaterina Juergens: Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK)

No 227-2025, IMK Working Paper from IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute

Abstract: This paper investigates whether political partisanship and political narratives affect voters’ opinions about public finances. In a novel survey experiment, we test the causal effect of pro-consolidation and pro-public investment narratives used in German general election campaigns on participants’ opinions on public debt and how to deal with budget deficits. We do not find a relevant average treatment effect of these narratives. However, they partly interact with political party preferences, which are a dominant covariate for opinions on public finances. We interpret our findings as a conjunction of narrative economics theory and the partisan bias literature, by which only emotionally charged narratives pass the partisan filter.

Keywords: public debt; survey experiment; partisan bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 H5 H6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imk:wpaper:227-2025

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