A0208
Title: Exploring political narratives in European elections and their role for election success
Authors: Ivan Savin - ESCP Business School, Madrid campus (Spain) [presenting]
Jessica Birkholz - University of Bremen (Germany)
Peter Winker - University of Giessen (Germany)
Abstract: The role of political narratives for success in political elections is hard to overestimate. Political parties promising to combat, e.g., inflation, unemployment or climate change, can be more successful than their rivals if their message meets the concerns of their voters. Over the last fifty years, Europe has experienced several crucial changes, ranging from the fall of the Iron Curtain and the global economic recession that started in 2007 through the strengthening of the European Union as a political and economic union to military conflicts in Yugoslavia and Ukraine. We plan to quantify the role of political narratives in fostering election success in European countries by considering country-specificities (e.g., their political system and history), their macroeconomic development, exposure to climate shocks, and the time of the election. We expect to build a map of political narratives present in European elections in the last half a century and demonstrate how different narratives were leading to better election results in different time periods and in different groups of countries (e.g. Western vs Eastern Europe, North vs South Europe). Quantifying the presence of different narratives in political party programs over time is the main purpose of the topic modelling method. We expect topics to capture different narratives political parties address during elections (poverty, unemployment, climate change, globalisation).
