Selected Working Papers
The Geographical Dimension of Group Based Appeals: Evidence from 50 Years of Swedish Parliamentary Speech
Revise and Resubmit, Political Geography
Which places do politicians appeal to, and how do they appeal to them? While previous research has emphasized how politicians appeal to different social groups, we know less about the geographical dimension of politicians' group-based appeals. In this paper I argue that politicians' use place-based appeals to display local awareness of their constituency, and that rural parliamentarians are most responsive. To test this claim, I use a new approach for identifying geographical mentions in speeches that combines named entity recognition and Geocoding. By analyzing fifty years of parliamentary speech in Sweden, I demonstrate that politicians are more likely to mention areas in their constituency, and that the topic of those speeches reflect local socioeconomic conditions. Moreover, I show that rural parliamentarians are more responsive to areas in their constituency, than urban parliamentarians. Moreover, my findings show that most speeches that use geographical appeals simultaneously mention social groups. Further analysis, show that an urban-rural divide in social group appeals has grown more pronounced in recent years. Overall, this study improves our understanding of geographical representation and how local conditions structure social group appeals.
