The Political Conditioning of Subjective Economic Evaluations: The Role of Party Discourse

Pardos‐Prado, Sergi; Sagarzazu, Iñaki

doi:10.1017/s0007123414000428

Cited by 23 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…The level of positive sentiment parties exhibit in their campaigns should also vary with objective measures of the state of the world. While parties will try to use the emotive content of their campaigns to get voters to see the world through a particular frame, the extent to which they can do this is constrained by economic reality (Parker-Stephen, 2013;Pardos-Prado and Sagarzazu, 2016). Campaign messages that are too positive when times are bad or too negative when times are good are likely to be ignored by voters as they deviate from their own personal experiences (Ansolabehere, 2006).…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

It Is Not Only What You Say, It Is Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

Crabtree

Golder

Gschwend

et al. 2020

The Journal of Politics

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What explains the type of electoral campaign run by political parties? We provide a new perspective on campaigns that focuses on the strategic use of emotive language. We argue that the level of positive sentiment parties adopt in their campaigns depends on their incumbency status, their policy position, and objective economic conditions. We test these claims with a novel dataset that captures the emotive language used in over 400 party manifestos across eight European countries. As predicted, we find that incumbent parties, particularly incumbent prime ministerial parties, use more positive sentiment than opposition parties. We find that ideologically moderate parties employ higher levels of positive sentiment than extremist parties. And we find that all parties exhibit lower levels of positive sentiment when the economy is performing poorly but that this negative effect is weaker for incumbents. Our analysis has important implications for research on campaign strategies and retrospective voting.

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Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

It Is Not Only What You Say, It Is Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

Crabtree

Golder

Gschwend

et al. 2020

The Journal of Politics

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show abstract

“…To determine the latter, the categorical coding scheme developed by the Conflict and Mediation Event Observation (CAMEO) 32 Adams, Ezrow, and Somer-Topcu 2014;Adams, Ezrow, and Wlezien 2016. 33 Herzog and Benoit 2015;Martin and Vanberg 2008;Proksch and Slapin 2015;Pardos-Prado and Sagarzazu 2016;Schwarz, Traber, andBenoit 2017. 34 Grimmer 2013;Grimmer, Westwood, and Messing 2015;Sagarzazu and Klüver 2017.…”

Section: Machine Coded Event Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…4 See, e.g., Bakker et al 2015;Budge et al 2001. 5 See, e.g., Grimmer 2013;Grimmer, Westwood, and Messing 2015;Herzog and Benoit 2015;Pardos-Prado and Sagarzazu 2016;Proksch and Slapin 2015;Sagarzazu and Klüver 2017;Schwarz, Traber, and Benoit 2017. 6 Hoff, Raftery, and Handcock 2002;Hoff 2005. 7 That is, in a one-dimensional space, they are both placed to the left or the right of the zero point.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Economic Crises on Political Representation in Public Communication: Evidence from the Eurozone

Weschle¹

2017

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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External threats such as war have been shown to disrupt representation as politicians 'put politics aside' and cooperate across cleavages. This article examines whether a severe economic crisis can have a similar effect. It introduces a new approach that provides a spatial representation of how political parties represent societal actors in their public interactions, based on more than 140,000 machine coded news events from eleven eurozone countries between 2001 and 2011. The study shows that in bad economic times, there is a compression of political representation: parties' relationships with the societal groups they are closest to become less cooperative, while their relationships with the groups they are least close to become less conflictual.

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“…The only exception was 2004, yet there are strong reasons to believe that the Madrid bombings heavily influenced the 2004 wave results. Second, research has found no relationship between economic competence and voting for the PSOE (Hamann, ), while at the same time finding a strong relationship between the PP and economic ownership (Pardos‐Prado and Sagarzazu, ). Third, socialist governments are associated with poor macroeconomic performance first during the democratic stabilization period of the 1980s and early 1990s and second during the postfinancial crisis in the late 2000s.…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As we mentioned above, these objectives are easier to meet if there is only one speaker (such as a speech). In either case, these two strategies have been linked together in the literature as we have found (not without disagreements) that issue attention by politicians is directly linked to the way people evaluate leaders and governments and can very well determine electoral outcomes (see, for instance, Petrocik, ; Ansolabehere and Iyengar, ; Williams, Seki, and Whitten, ; Pardos‐Prado and Sagarzazu, ). The strategic nature makes these debates that much more informative for analyzing the effects of political communication.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Making and Breaking Party Leaders? An Informational Theory of Temporary and Lasting Impacts of Prime Minister Debates in Spain

Sagarzazu

Williams

2017

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective. In this project, we develop an informational theory that identifies which prime minister debates are the most meaningful in terms of shifting Spanish public opinion . We argue that debates immediately following the installation of new leaders (because they shine light on leadership traits) and debates occurring in times of crisis (because voters can judge both the leader's ability to remedy the problems and their policy proposals) will have the largest short-and long-term effects. Methods. We use seemingly unrelated regression to explore the impacts of 15 Spanish State of the Nation debates from 1998 to 2016 on vote intention for Partido Popular (PP) and the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (PSOE). Result. Debates following the installation of new party leaders often produce sizable improvements in vote intention, but the most meaningful debates occur during economic crises. Conclusion. Parliamentary debates are valuable opportunities for party leaders to shift public opinion in their favor, a fact that is not lost to them considering the time and energy devoted to crafting strategies, and the media's fascination with providing extensive coverage of the debates. This study has important implications for the study of dynamic processes (such as vote intention), and the link between parties' strategic communications and voting behavior.

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The Political Conditioning of Subjective Economic Evaluations: The Role of Party Discourse

Abstract: 7Classic and revisionist perspectives on economic voting have

Cited by 23 publications

References 64 publications

It Is Not Only What You Say, It Is Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

It Is Not Only What You Say, It Is Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

The Impact of Economic Crises on Political Representation in Public Communication: Evidence from the Eurozone

Making and Breaking Party Leaders? An Informational Theory of Temporary and Lasting Impacts of Prime Minister Debates in Spain

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