Abstract:

This paper investigates whether politicians attempt to manipulate public perceptions when exposed to “bad news”. I treat mass shootings as bad news for politicians opposing gun control and combine shootings in the U.S. with data on political communication on Twitter, 2010 - 2020. Exploiting the random timing of mass shootings and applying quantitative text-analysis and deep-learning techniques to the twitter-data, I demonstrate that pro-politicians try to distract the public from the mass shooting and provide misleading information about the causes of mass shootings. The results are consistent with a conceptual framework in which politicians who face bad news communicate strategically to (i) prevent belief updating or (ii) distort the belief formation process of voters towards supporting policies other than gun-control.

Abstract:

Does historical exposure to feudalism impair interpersonal trust today? This paper examines the long-run consequences of feudalism, a set of labor coercion and migration restrictions that deprived the peasantry from access to markets and fostered social closure. I combine survey-data from modern Germany with administrative data measuring the intensity of feudalism at the county-level in the Prussian Empire (1816 - 1849) to test whether feudal repercussions continue to depress interpersonal trust today. I find that a greater legacy of feudalism is associated with lower interpersonal trust; a result that is robust to taking into account rich sets of historical and socio-demographic controls. Moreover, I adopt a mover-design to isolate the culturally embodied part of feudalism from place-based confounders and demonstrate that distrust against strangers persists. Last, I propose a new instrument for feudalism based on the interaction of naturally occurring differences in the share of sandy soil and population losses in the Thirty Years War (1618 - 1648). Overall, the results suggest that the shadow of the coercive feudal restrictions continues to depress cultural openness towards foreigners until today.