"Nein" to Joint European Debt. Or, Maybe, Yes?

• In Event: Quantitative Study of Elite Communications

Abstract

This study investigates whether European citizens form independent opinions on complex foreign policy issues or rely on party cues, as suggested by existing literature. Previous research in this domain faces a methodological dilemma: either robustly identifying the impact of party cues on low salience issues through experimental manipulation, or examining opinion dynamics on high salience issues without clear causal identification. Our study overcomes these limitations by leveraging a natural experiment: the sudden shift in the Christian Democratic Union's (CDU) policy stance on European debt during the pandemic, a topic of high salience in Germany.

Utilizing Twitter data, we constructed a panel study with fine-grained opinion measures to track policy-specific opinion shifts. Our methodology involved a medium-sized language model to detect tweets about European debt, assessing the users' stances and underlying motivations. To determine users' political affiliations (treatment assignment), we developed a pre-treatment measure based on semantic analysis of tweets from official party accounts, press releases, and party manifestos. This measure, validated using a dataset of 2,500 party politicians' Twitter accounts from the 2021 German federal election, allowed us to link users to parties based on the semantic similarity of their tweets to party positions.

Our key findings reveal a persistent skepticism among German Twitter users towards European debt, challenging the notion that public opinions on European integration policies are easily influenced by elite perspectives. This skepticism persisted even in the face of Chancellor Merkel’s significant policy reversal, indicating strong, pre-existing public preferences resistant to elite persuasion. Additionally, our study examines the causal impact of the CDU's policy shift on its supporters and politicians. Preliminary results show a notable alignment in politicians' opinions with the new party direction, providing insights into how top-level political decisions shape discourse among party members and activists. Research on the reactions of ordinary CDU supporters is ongoing at the time of this abstract submission.

Author

• Maksim Zubok