Working Papers
Here you can find my working papers.
2025
- Working PaperWhen Are Parties Going Off-Topic and Which Issues Do They Sacrifice?Elias Koch, and Christoph Ivanusch2025Under Review
Are parties actively reframing political debates to divert attention from issues they prefer not to address? Parties selectively emphasize issues, but it has remained unclear whether they strategically sacrifice others when doing so. We argue that parties are strategically going off-topic by diverting from the agenda, to emphasize other issues. To test this argument, we trace shifts in parties’ issue attention in the German Bundestag (2009–2021) and the Austrian Nationalrat (1996–2019), combining legislative bills, speeches, and party manifestos, classified with fine-tuned transformer models. Following GLM and Difference-in-Differences approaches, we show that parties are more likely to go off-topic when the agenda is dominated by issues they neither own nor prioritize programmatically, seeking to redirect attention toward more advantageous matters. Hence, parties not only selectively emphasize issues but also consciously sacrifice others, guided by consistent rationales. Consequently, parties with heterogeneous issue preferences have strategic incentives to divert from the agenda.
- Working PaperHow should we communicate election polls?Elias Koch, Linus Hagemann, Simon Munzert, Hannah Rajski, Thomas Gschwend, Cornelius Erfort, and Lukas Stoetzer2025In Preparation
Pre-election polls shape how voters understand electoral competition, yet news outlets vary widely in how they present them. To assess how design and content choices in poll reporting affect audience perceptions, we fielded a large visual conjoint experiment during the 2025 German federal election (N = 23,300). Participants were presented with one of 160 versions of the same poll, randomly varying reporting formats and technical elements such as reference values, uncertainty information, and sampling details. Across all comparisons, any visualisation — bar charts, dot plots, or line graphs — were rated as substantially more attractive and more trustworthy than text-only formats, which still dominate real-world poll reporting, especially among less statistically literate participants. The effects of technical features were more mixed: some improved trust, others reduced perceived clarity, and few altered expectations about the state of party competition. These results show that how polls are communicated meaningfully shapes their reception and provide evidence-based guidelines for designing clearer, more trustworthy reporting of public opinion signals.
- Working PaperMotivated Reasoning in Poll ConsumptionElias Koch2025In Preparation