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Replication Data for: Does Public Opinion Affect Political Speech?

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Does Public Opinion Affect Political Speech?
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SLXRVJ
 
Creator Hager, Anselm
Hilbig, Hanno
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Does public opinion affect political speech? Of particular interest is whether public opinion affects (i) what topics politicians address and (ii) what positions they endorse. We present evidence from Germany where the government was recently forced to declassify its public opinion research, allowing us to link the content of the research to subsequent speeches. Our causal identification strategy exploits the exogenous timing of the research's dissemination to cabinet members within a window of a few days. We find that exposure to public opinion research leads politicians to markedly change their speech. First, we show that linguistic similarity between political speech and public opinion research increases significantly after reports are passed on to the cabinet, suggesting that politicians change the topics they address. Second, we demonstrate that exposure to public opinion research alters politicians' substantive positions in the direction of majority opinion.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Public opinion
 
Contributor Hilbig, Hanno
 
Source Bundeswahlleiter, Der. “Vergleichszahlen früherer Europa-, Bundestags und Landtagswahlen sowie Strukturdaten für die kreisfreien Städte und Landkreise.” Der Bundeswahlleiter, Wiesbaden, April 2019. https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/en/dam/jcr/0d80891b-aa0b-443b-9a45-007d28a9b817/btw09_kerg.csv


Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, Mannheim (2019): Politbarometer 1977-2017 (Partielle Kumulation). GESIS Datenarchiv, Köln. ZA2391 Datenfile Version 10.0.0, doi:10.4232/1.13243


Rauh, Christian; De Wilde, Pieter; Schwalbach, Jan (2017): The ParlSpeech data set: Annotated full-text vectors of 3.9 million plenary speeches in the key legislative chambers of seven European states. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/E4RSP9, Harvard Dataverse, V1