Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments October 21, 2021 erstellt
Description:
Leaders often send political messages to try to influence citizens and voters. But, what makes their messages more or less salient? One possibility is that the salience of political messages increases if voters are exposed to events related to the messages. We study this question using the 2019 national election in India, where Prime Minister Modi’s speeches focused on his aggressive response to deadly attacks on soldiers. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we find that the vote share of the PM’s incumbent party increased by 4.6 percentage points in the home constituencies of dead soldiers. Text analysis of Modi’s speeches reveals that only deaths referenced by him affect public opinion, but deaths not referenced by him do not. Our paper is one of the first to study how event exposure interacts with political messages to affect voting behaviour