Topic salience and political polarization: Evidence from the German "PISA shock"

Arbeitspapier

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.

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• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: ifo Working Paper ; No. 402

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior ; Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
• Subject: polarization ; text analysis ; machine learning ; Germany ; PISA shock

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Sancassani, Pietro
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2023

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/276292