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  5. Narratives in the Media
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Narratives in the Media

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM (CST)

Convention Center, 221C
Hosted By: American Economic Association
  • Chair: Panu Poutvaara, University of Munich and ifo Institute

Strange Synergies: Education and Eugenics in the United States

Elliott Ash
,
ETH Zurich
Guohui Jiang
,
University of Zurich
Joachim Voth
,
University of Zurich

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between education, eugenics, and public policy in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using newly collected data on newspaper article texts, eugenics research association membership, and legislative support for forced sterilization, we find evidence that places with higher levels of human capital were more likely to embrace eugenics ideas. Using the newspaper texts, we show that the salient eugenics narrative of "race suicide" diffused more in areas with higher education levels. These areas were more likely to have scientists joining eugenics research associations, were more likely to elect state legislators that voted for sterilization laws, and were more likely to elect federal legislators that used eugenics-based arguments in discussions of public policy. The analysis suggests that education played a significant role in shaping public attitudes towards eugenics, as well as in the use of eugenics-based arguments in policy debates, in particular related as related to immigration.

Is Propaganda Front-Page News?

Philine Widmer
,
ETH Zurich

Abstract

In recent decades, autocrats have shifted to less overt forms of censorship. This project studies the mechanics of subtle forms of censorship in Chinese online newspapers. Specifically, it documents how these newspapers systematically publish articles more aligned with the regime's perspective on their front-pages -- relative to other places on the website. To do so, I use data from 280,000 news articles (2020) and the individuals, organizations, geographic locations, or events mentioned therein. Based on this data, I build two text-based measures of an article's alignment with the regime's perspective. More aligned articles are more likely to feature on the front-page even when controlling for variation across days, topics, and outlets. Various checks strengthen the interpretation that subtle censorship motives (rather than market mechanisms) influence this within-outlet product differentiation.

Immigrant Narratives

Joop Adema
,
ifo Institute
Kai Gehring
,
University of Bern and Wyss Academy
Panu Poutvaara
,
University of Munich and ifo Institute

Abstract

Immigration is one of the most divisive political issues in many countries today. Competing narratives, circulated via the media, are crucial in shaping how immigrants’ role in society is perceived. We propose a new method combining advanced natural language processing tools with dictionaries to identify sentences containing one or more of seven immigrant narrative themes and assign a sentiment to each of these. Our narrative dataset covers 107,428 newspaper articles from 70 German newspapers over the 2000 to 2019 period. Using 16 human coders to evaluate our method, we find that it clearly outperforms simple word-matching methods and sentiment dictionaries. Empirically, culture narratives are more common than economy-related narratives. Narratives related to work and entrepreneurship are particularly positive, while foreign religion and welfare narratives tend to be negative. We use three distinct events to show how different types of shocks influence narratives, decomposing sentiment shifts into theme-composition and within-theme changes.

Social Media and the Diffusion of Protest: Evidence from Black Lives Matter

Annali Casanueva Artis
,
Paris School of Economics
Vladimir Avetian
,
Paris Dauphine University
Sulin Sardoschau
,
Humboldt University
Kritika Saxena
,
University of Groningen

Abstract

Why do some social movements expand and reach diverse populations while others stagnate? We explore this question in the context of the rapid diffusion of the Black Lives Matter movement to new counties during the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that the pandemic acted as a shock to the size and composition of social media networks and subsequently mobilized protest in new segments of society. Leveraging early super spreader events as a source of plausibly exogenous variation, we show that a one standard deviation increase in pandemic exposure (23 COVID-19 related deaths per 100K) increased the number of new Twitter accounts by 27% and protest probability by 9 percentage points in counties that had never hosted a BLM protest before, which are primarily white, affluent, and suburban counties. We also show that BLM protests are more likely to arise in places where residents increased their use of social media in response to the pandemic. Our results suggest that social media is an important engine in the diffusion of social movements to new groups.

Discussant(s)
Panu Poutvaara
,
University of Munich and ifo Institute
Melanie Meng Xue
,
London School of Economics
Milena Djourelova
,
Cornell University
Vasiliki Fouka
,
Stanford University
JEL Classifications
  • Z1 - Cultural Economics; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology
  • D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making