{"title":"Strategic Campaign Communication: Evidence from 30,000 Candidate Manifestos","authors":"Caroline Le Pennec","doi":"10.1093/ej/uead082","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Politicians seeking to persuade voters may not always be able to say what they would like to. Adopting policy positions opposite to that of their party or contradicting their previous policy announcements may be costly. I use computational text analysis on 30,000 candidate manifestos from two-round French elections to show that politicians take these costs into account, by toeing the party line and sticking to their platform, while also strategically adjusting their campaign communication and advertising neutral non-policy issues when they need to reach a broader electorate. I provide suggestive evidence that this moderation of electoral discourse predicts better performance in office and may therefore provide valuable information to voters.","PeriodicalId":48448,"journal":{"name":"Economic Journal","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":3.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Economic Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/uead082","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Abstract Politicians seeking to persuade voters may not always be able to say what they would like to. Adopting policy positions opposite to that of their party or contradicting their previous policy announcements may be costly. I use computational text analysis on 30,000 candidate manifestos from two-round French elections to show that politicians take these costs into account, by toeing the party line and sticking to their platform, while also strategically adjusting their campaign communication and advertising neutral non-policy issues when they need to reach a broader electorate. I provide suggestive evidence that this moderation of electoral discourse predicts better performance in office and may therefore provide valuable information to voters.
期刊介绍:
The Economic Journal is the Royal Economic Society''s flagship title, and is one of the founding journals of modern economics. Over the past 125 years the journal has provided a platform for high quality and imaginative economic research, earning a worldwide reputation excellence as a general journal publishing papers in all fields of economics for a broad international readership. It is invaluable to anyone with an active interest in economic issues and is a key source for professional economists in higher education, business, government and the financial sector who want to keep abreast of current thinking in economics.