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Schwarz, Carlo Rasmus (2020) Essays in politicial economy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3711252
Abstract
This dissertation consists of three papers investigating the causes and consequences of antiliberal and populist trends that affected Western countries in the first two decades of the 20th century.
The first paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime in Germany. We show that anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in the timing of major Facebook and internet outages. Consistent with a role for “echo chambers", we find that social media posts contain narrower and more loaded content than news reports. Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism for violent crimes by enabling the spread of extreme viewpoints.
The second paper studies whether social media can activate hatred of minorities, with a focus on Donald Trump's political rise. We show that the increase in anti-Muslim sentiment in the US since the start of Trump's presidential campaign has been concentrated in counties with high Twitter usage. To establish causality, we develop an identification strategy based on Twitter's early adopters at the South by Southwest festival. We also show that Trump's tweets about Islam-related topics are highly correlated with anti-Muslim hate crimes after the start of his presidential campaign, but not before.
The third paper sheds light on the trends in citizen polarization in Western countries. To this end, we propose a novel methodology to identify the underlying ideologies of citizens by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation to political survey data. This approach indicates that in addition to a left-right scale, confidence in institutions defines another major ideological dimension. We find evidence for citizens shifting away from centrist ideologies into antiestablishment `anarchist' ideologies over time. This trend is especially pronounced for the US.
| Item Type: | Thesis or Dissertation (PhD) | ||||
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| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare H Social Sciences > HX Socialism. Communism. Anarchism J Political Science > JC Political theory J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration |
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| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Populism -- History -- 21st century, Populism -- Western countries, Social media and society -- Germany, Social media -- Moral and ethical aspects, Social media -- Political aspects, Hate crimes -- Germany, Refugees -- Abuse of -- Germany, Islamophobia, Trump, Donald, 1946-, Government, Resistance to, Anarchism | ||||
| Official Date: | July 2020 | ||||
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
| Theses Department: | Department of Economics | ||||
| Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
| Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
| Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Müller, Karsten ; Draca, Mirko | ||||
| Format of File: | |||||
| Extent: | 298 leaves : illustrations | ||||
| Language: | eng |
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