Working Papers
Here you can find my working papers.
2026
- Working PaperWhen Democracy is at Stake: System-Level Ambitions in Party CompetitionElias Koch2026Available on Request
- Working PaperHow should we communicate election polls?Elias Koch, Linus Hagemann, Simon Munzert, Hannah Rajski, Thomas Gschwend, Cornelius Erfort, and Lukas Stoetzer2026Available on request
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 influence audience perceptions, we fielded a large visual conjoint experiment during the 2025 German federal election (N = 23,695), including subsamples of voters (N = 23,587), journalists (N = 108), and parliamentary candidates (N = 143). 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 increased trust, others reduced perceived clarity, and few altered expectations about election outcomes. The findings demonstrate that the communication of polls meaningfully shapes their reception and provide evidence-based guidance for designing clearer and more trustworthy reporting of public opinion signals.
- Working PaperCan an Interactive Dashboard Teach Polling Literacy? Evidence from a Large-Scale ExperimentSimon Munzert, Linus Hagemann, Elias Koch, Hannah Rajski, Thomas Gschwend, Cornelius Erfort, and Lukas Stoetzer2026Available on request
Election polls are among the most visible quantitative inputs into democratic deliberation, yet their production process remains opaque to most citizens. Without a working understanding of how polls are produced, people may place too much trust in flawed estimates or dismiss credible ones as biased—either way undermining the capacity of polls to meaningfully inform public debate. We build an interactive dashboard that simulates key pollster decisions—setting sample sizes, choosing recruitment methods, applying statistical weights—and evaluate its use in a pre-registered survey experiment (N = 52,765, fielded ahead of the 2025 German federal election). The intervention fails to achieve any of its three pre-registered objectives. It does not improve polling-related knowledge: aggregate effects are null, and while the dashboard teaches respondents that representative polls need not be enormous, it undermines their understanding of why statistical weighting matters. It does not foster more positive attitudes towards polls: perceived usefulness is unchanged, while treated respondents become more critical of polls’ influence on politics. And it does not sharpen evaluative behavior: in a forced-choice conjoint task, treated respondents become less appreciative of weighting rather than more so. All effects are small in absolute terms, and our sample is large enough to be confident in this conclusion. These findings suggest that interactive tools can backfire when they lack pedagogical scaffolding, and that improving public understanding of polls is harder than building a better tool.
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 PaperMotivated Reasoning in Poll ConsumptionElias Koch2025In Preparation