Referendum Campaigns and Values (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: How Campaigns Shape Voters

Abstract

Referendum campaigns can affect voters' decisions. We show that political campaigns have additional and more far-reaching consequences and affect political values unrelated to the campaign issues. We exploit over 150 issue-specific campaigns before direct democratic votes at the ballot box in Switzerland. We show that political campaigns affect far more than the immediate vote choice at the ballot box: the campaigns impact fundamental political values of members of the mass public. Basic political values respond to related and unrelated issues in a systematic way. The estimation results show that direct democratic ballot votes have an effect on the value structure of citizens, both in the short- and in the long-term: more polarized ballot votes are associated with more polarized values and this association persists across time. These findings have implications for normative and empirical research.

Authors

• Garret Binding, University of Zürich

• Lucas Leemann, University of Zurich

• Thomas Christian Willi