Passing the Partisan Filter: Political Narratives, Partisan Bias, and Opinions on Public Finances

ABSTRACT This paper investigates whether political partisanship and political narratives affect voters' opinions about public finances. In a novel survey experiment, we test the causal effect of pro‐consolidation and pro‐public investment narratives used in German general election campaigns on participants' opinions on public debt and budget deficits. We do not find a relevant average treatment effect of these narratives. However, the interaction patterns suggest that responses to these narratives may vary with political party preferences, which are a dominant covariate for opinions on public finances. We interpret our findings as a conjunction of narrative economics theory and the partisan bias literature, by which emotionally charged narratives may be more likely to pass the partisan filter.