Prof. Dr. Beat Hintermann | Léo Picard

Öffentliche Finanzen

Project Objectives
The objective of this project is to assess the impact of regional economic hardship on politicians’ communication in their television advertisements during election campaigns. Specifically, it examines if areas most exposed to trade competition from China experience more, and more vicious, political attack ads, and if this political negativity varies across politicians and topics.

Completed Steps
We extracted the dialogue from each advertisement from unstructured data sources, such as videos. These transcripts were then annotated for the presence, intensity, and aim of political attacks. In addition, the aggressiveness of language was evaluated using toxicity scores. We have completed the regression analyses and produced results for all outcome variables. A draft paper has been written and will serve as the basis for submission to an academic journal.

Results
We find that challenger candidates (as opposed to incumbents, who hold office) are more likely to attack their opponents in areas most exposed to import competition from China, but there is no effect for incumbents. This “challenger” effect persists for three election cycles, beginning in 2008–2010 and ending in 2016–2018. In the first cycle, policy-based attacks increase, consistent with challengers attributing economic hardship to incumbents’ policies. Over time, as responsibility becomes harder to assign, challengers’ attacks shift away from policies and toward personal characteristics, and they employ more aggressive language. Taken together, these results show that local economic hardship is associated with increases in attack advertising strategies, and that policy debate erodes over time, giving way to personal attacks. These findings may help explain the rise of political polarization in the American society.

Publications
First, the draft will be revised based on feedback received from future conference presentations. We then plan to submit the paper to academic journals, likely in the second half of 2026. Potential outlets include economics journals (such as European Economic Review and Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization) and political science journals (such as Political Analysis, Electoral Studies, and Party Politics).

Präsentationen und Konferenzen
• May 14th, 2025: WWZ Economics Lunch, University of Basel
• September 16th, 2025: 10th Monash-Paris-Warwick-Zurich CEPR Text-as-Data Workshop (online)
• September 19th, 2025: Advisory Political Economy meeting, Stockholm University
• January 22nd, 2026: Digital Humanities Lab meeting, University of Basel

Further conference submissions are planned for presentations in the first half of 2026.