Working Papers
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'Analyzing Climate Change Policy Narratives with the Character-Role Narrative Framework'
(with Kai Gehring)
Abstract: Understanding behavioral aspects of collective decision-making is an important challenge for eco-nomics, and narratives are a crucial group-based mechanism that influences human decision-making. This paper introduces the Character-Role Narrative Framework as a tool to systematically analyze narratives, and applies it to study US climate change policy on Twitter over the 2010-2021 period. We build on the idea of the so-called drama triangle that suggests, within the context of a topic, the essence of a narrative is captured by its characters in one of three essential roles: hero, villain, and victim. We show how this intuitive framework can be easily integrated into an empirical pipeline and scaled up to large text corpora using supervised machine learning. In our application to US climate change policy narratives, we find strong changes in the frequency of simple and complex character-role narratives over time. Using contagiousness, popularity, and sparking conversation as three distinct dimensions of virality, we show that narratives that are simple, feature human characters and emphasize villains tend to be more viral. Focusing on Donald Trump as an example of a populist leader, we demonstrate that populism is linked to a higher share of such simple, human, and villain-focused narratives.
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'Censorship in Democracy'
(with Marcel Caesman, Janis Goldzycher and Lorenz Gschwent)
Abstract: The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and biased narratives from autocratic regimes, especially on social media, is a growing concern in many democracies. Can censorship be an effective tool to curb the spread of such slanted narratives? In this paper, we study the European Union’s ban on Russian state-led news outlets after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We analyze 775,616 tweets from 133,276 users on Twitter/X, employing a difference-in-differences strategy. We show that the ban reduced pro-Russian slant among users who had previously directly interacted with banned outlets. The impact is most pronounced among users with the highest pre-ban slant levels. However, this effect was short-lived, with slant returning to its pre-ban levels within two weeks post-enforcement. Additionally, we find a detectable albeit less pronounced indirect effect on users who had not directly interacted with the outlets before the ban. We provide evidence that other suppliers of propaganda may have actively sought to mitigate the ban’s influence by intensifying their activity, effectively counteracting the persistence and reach of the ban.
Current Projects
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'Narrative Intervention: The Case of Production Technology for Gold-Mining in Peru'
(with Fernando Fernandez, Kai Gehring and Arne Weiss)
Abstract: Narratives significantly shape economic and political decision-making processes, yet understanding their causal impact remains a critical challenge. This paper investigates the influence of narratives on economic choices, specifically within the context of environmentally sustainable mining in the Peruvian Amazon. We focus on how weaving information on clean technology into narratives affects artisanal miners' decisions. The study contrasts groups of miners receiving information embedded in an aspirational narrative against a control group that receives information in a factual manner. Our study aims to provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of narratives in policy settings.