Applied Economics Lunch Seminar

Du 18/12/2018 de 12:30 à 13:30

Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

LE PENNEC Caroline (HEC Montréal)

Electoral competition, campaign messages and commitment: Evidence from French Legislative Elections (1958-1993)

Do politicians strategically adjust their campaign messages under electoral competition and do these messages matter? In this paper we assess the extent to which politicians' discourse responds to natural variation in the set of competitors they face in two-round elections. We exploit a unique dataset of about 30,000 manifestos circulated by candidates to the French legislative elections before each election round between 1958 and 1993. Using computational text analysis methods to scale these manifestos on a left-to-right axis, we show that candidates who make it to the runoff tend to become more neutral and similar to each other in the second round. This is particularly true among candidates who were more extreme in the first round but less so among incumbent and elected candidates. We further explore several dimensions along which the content of manifestos changes between election rounds and find that candidates tend to drop policy platform elements, add mentions of local places in their district and use words related to communal moral values relatively more often than words related to universal ones. We next collect the written questions to the government issued by elected representatives to voice their voters' concerns on specific topics or policies. We use various approaches to compare manifestos to questions' content and find weak to zero correlation between the two, suggesting that neither campaign messages nor their adjustment under electoral competition are binding once politicians are elected.