Do Politicians Change Public Attitudes?

Magnus Carlsson, Gordon Dahl and Dan-Olof Rooth

No 10349, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: A large theoretical and empirical literature explores whether politicians and political parties change their policy positions in response to voters' preferences. This paper asks the opposite question: do political parties affect public attitudes on important policy issues? Problems of reverse causality and omitted variable bias make this a difficult question to answer empirically. We study attitudes towards the signature policies of small parties in Sweden using panel data from 290 municipal election districts. To identify causal effects, we take advantage of large nonlinearities in the function which assigns council seats, comparing otherwise similar elections where one party either barely wins or loses an additional seat. We estimate that a one seat increase for the anti-nuclear party reduces support for nuclear energy in that municipality by 3.3 percentage points. In contrast, when an anti-immigration or far left politician gets elected, negative attitudes towards immigration decrease by 4.8 percentage points and support for a six hour workday falls by 3.2 percentage points, respectively, in opposition to each party's policy position. Mirroring these attitudinal changes, the anti-nuclear party receives more votes in the next election after gaining a seat, while the anti-immigrant and far left parties lose their incumbency advantage. Exploring two possible mechanisms, we find evidence that when the anti-immigrant party gains an extra seat, they draw in lower quality politicians and receive negative local newspaper coverage. These findings have important implications for the theory and estimation of how voter preferences enter into electoral and political economy models.

Keywords: voter preferences; incumbency effects; media influence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published as 'Backlash in policy attitudes after the election of an extreme political party' in: Journal of Public Economics, 2021, 204, 104533

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10349.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:iza:izadps:dp10349

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().