Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/333507 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
IMK Working Paper No. 227
Publisher: 
Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, Institut für Makroökonomie und Konjunkturforschung (IMK), Düsseldorf
Abstract: 
This paper investigates whether political partisanship and political narratives affect voters' opinions about public finances. In a novel survey experiment, we test the causal effect of pro-consolidation and pro-public investment narratives used in German general election campaigns on participants' opinions on public debt and how to deal with budget deficits. We do not find a relevant average treatment effect of these narratives. However, they partly interact with political party preferences, which are a dominant covariate for opinions on public finances. We interpret our findings as a conjunction of narrative economics theory and the partisan bias literature, by which only emotionally charged narratives pass the partisan filter.
JEL: 
D8
H5
H6
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.