Speaker: Professor Marco Manacorda (Queen Mary University of London)
Hosted by: University of Liverpool Management School's Economics Group
Open to: Management School PhD students and academic staff, with no sign up needed
Date: Wednesday 15 November 2023
Time: 2-3.15pm
Place: 126 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool L3 5SR - Lecture Theatre 113
Abstract
We study the political effects of the diffusion of mobile Internet between 2007 and 2017 using administrative data on electoral outcomes and on mobile Internet signal across the 82,094 municipalities of twenty European countries, which we complement with individual survey data on voters’ values and positions.
In line with literature in social psychology claiming that social media promote tribalism and make individuals particularly permeable to xenophobic messages that prime the insiders at the expense of the outsiders, we show that this technology led to an increase in voters’ support for communitarian parties campaigning on nationalism and dislike of strangers and minorities.
Our estimates suggest that between one third and one half of the remarkable success of communitarian parties, which roughly doubled their support over the period, can be ascribed to enhanced access to mobile Internet technology.
Speaker
Marco is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Queen Mary University of London and joint Managing Editor of the Royal Economic Society The Economic Journal.
His interests and expertise are at the intersection of political economy, labour, development and public economics.
He is also a Research Associate at CEP, at the London School of Economics, a Research Fellow of CEPR, IZA and CesIfo and a Research Affiliate of the Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti. He has also been the recipient of the Nuffield Foundation New Development Fellowship in the Social Sciences, a Research Fellow at the LSE and Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, Visiting Professor at Princeton University, EIEF and Bocconi University.
Marco have written and researched on Latin America, Europe, the USA and Africa and contributed to different streams of literature, including on Migration, Family Arrangements, Fertility, Child Labor, Schooling, Early Child Development, Social Protection, Unemployment, Skills Mismatch, Labor Market Informality, Wage Inequality, Violence, Corruption, Voting and Political participation. My work appears among others, in The American Economic Review, Econometrica, The American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, The American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, The Journal of the European Economic Association, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Journal of Labor Economics, The Journal of Public Economics and The Journal of Development Economics
His research is regularly featured in the media, including The Guardian, The Financial Time, The Economist, Le Monde, The Independent, TIME Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica. He is also an occasional TV and Radio commentator, having appeared on Al Jazeera, CNN, BBC, Voice of America.
Marco has an interest in the interaction between research and policy making. In the past, he has been a member of the OECD Scientific Committee for the Review of Labor Migration Policy in the EU and Lead Research Advisor for UCW, the UNICEF-ILO-World Bank program on child labor and, in this role, member of the United States Department of Labour Education Initiative Technical Advisory Group. He has worked on the design and evaluation of the Uruguayan Plan de Atencion Nacional a la Emergencia Social. He has also been part of the Inter-American Development Bank Crime Prevention Roundtable and have advised and consulted for the Inter-American Development Bank, the Word Bank, UNICEF and ILO on themes of labor markets, social assistance, early child development and citizens’ security.
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