Daniel Bischof

How do the tone and style of political messages affect citizens? While research has unpacked which politicians demarcate themselves with their tone and style, we know little about how this resonates with citizens. We theorize that linguistic simplicity, as a communication style, should increase citizens’ political knowledge and affect their beliefs about politicians. Simple language is used as a heuristic signaling that politicians are among the “people” and this might increase politicians’ public support. In pre-registered and large-scale survey experiments conducted in Germany, respondents are shown political statements randomly varying in linguistic simplicity, among other factors. Simplicity increases respondents’ political knowledge and is used by them as a heuristic to fill informational gaps about politicians’ socio-economic backgrounds. In the electoral arena sophistication moderates the effect of politicians’ policy positions. Our findings showcase that linguistic styles can be a major tool for contemporary political campaigns.

Why is support for the radical right higher in some geographic locations than others? This paper argues that what is frequently classified as the “rural” bases of radical right support in previous research is in part the result of something different: communities that were in the historical “periphery” in the center-periphery conflicts of modern nation-state formation. Inspired by a classic state-building literature that emphasizes the prevalence of a “wealth of tongues” (Weber 1976)—or nonstandard linguistic dialects in a region—as a definition of the periphery, we use data from more than 725,000 geo-coded responses in a linguistic survey in Germany to show that voters from historically peripheral geographic communities are more likely to vote for the radical right today.

Generations of research have incrementally identified the circumstances under which electoral campaigns matter. Direct, interpersonal contact within local networks is commonly seen as conducive to campaign impact but empirical evidence is scarce due to demanding data requirements. We advance the literature by studying the Movimento Cinque Stelle, an important challenger party in Italy, which followed the unusual practice of coordinating all political activities on a public online platform. We webscraped the entire event history of the Movement’s more than 1,000 local branches with over 200,000 geocoded political activities to study the effect and mechanisms of their campaign against the 2016 constitutional referendum – a watershed moment in Italian politics. Relying on regression, matching, and instrumental variable models, we demonstrate substantial campaign effects. Our results indicate that social networks amplify the effectiveness of a campaign while highlighting both the continued relevance and the particular potency of place-based political mobilization.

Whether powerful media outlets have effects on public opinion has been at the heart of theoretical and empirical discussions about the media’s role in political life. Yet, the effects of media campaigns are difficult to study because citizens self-select into media consumption. Using a quasi-experiment—the 30-year boycott of the most important Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper, The Sun, in Merseyside caused by the Hillsborough soccer disaster—we identify the effects of The Sun boycott on attitudes toward leaving the EU. Difference-in-differences designs using public opinion data spanning three decades, supplemented by referendum results, show that the boycott caused EU attitudes to become more positive in treated areas. This effect is driven by cohorts socialized under the boycott and by working-class voters who stopped reading The Sun. Our findings have implications for our understanding of public opinion, media influence, and ways to counter such influence in contemporary democracies.

Do voters polarize ideologically when radical views gain political legitimacy, or does the rise of radical voices merely reflect societal conflict? We argue that elite polarization as signaled by radical parties’ first entrance into parliament leads to voter divergence. Immediately after the election, legitimization and backlash effects mean that voters on both ideological sides move toward the extremes. In the longer term, this polarization is solidified because of radical parties’ parliamentary presence. A panel study of Dutch voters shows that the 2002 parliamentary entrance of a radical-right party indeed led to immediate ideological polarization across the political spectrum. Estimating time-series cross-sectional models on Eurobarometer data from 17 countries (1973–2016) shows an additional long-term impact of radical-right party entry on polarization. The presence of radical voices on the right has polarizing effects, illustrating how such institutional recognition and legitimization can have a far-reaching impact on society.