We investigate whether US House representatives favour special interest groups over constituents in periods of low media attention to politics. Analysing 666 roll calls from 2005 to 2018, we show that representatives are more likely to vote against their constituency’s preferred position the more special interest money they receive from groups favouring the opposite position. The latter effect is significantly larger when less attention is paid to politics due to distraction by exogenous newsworthy events like natural disasters. The effect is mostly driven by short-term opportunistic behaviour than the short-term scheduling of controversial votes in periods with high news pressure.
While recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are already contributing value to the economy and society, fears of massive job losses are increasingly coming to the forefront of political debate. Against this backdrop, this paper sheds light on the relationship between AI technology and potential workforce vulnerability. We developed a novel measure to quantify the potential exposure of occupations, considering unaffectedness, substitution, and complementarity effects, incorporating a task-technology fit perspective. We contrasted the measure with data on employment, education, and wages in Switzerland to examine the impact of AI at the aggregate level. The results indicate that about 10 percent of the Swiss workforce is strongly affected by AI substitution due to their specific task content. In contrast, AI can complement 61 percent of the Swiss workforce in about half of their current tasks, eventually increasing individual performance. Occupations in the finance and insurance and professional, scientific, and technical services sectors can benefit most from the complementary effects of AI. In contrast, occupations in the accommodation and food services sector are most affected by AI substitution. In addition, we found substitution to be most prevalent in low-skilled occupations, requiring lower levels of education and inhibiting lower wage levels.
This paper examines the role of local TV market structure in U.S. congressional politics, exploiting variation in the overlaps of political markets and TV markets. Local TV stations are hypothesized to report relatively more per U.S. House representative in less populous markets (where the number of House districts covered is smaller), leading to better-informed voters and more accountable representatives. We find that smaller markets are indeed associated with (i) higher coverage of representatives and (ii) a higher level of voters’ knowledge about their representatives. However, (iii) representatives of smaller and more congruent markets are only more likely to decide aligned with their constituents’ policy preferences in highly competitive districts. This evidence suggests that local political news coverage on TV serves as a complement rather than a substitute in holding members of the U.S. Congress accountable.
2021
Data Pipelines in Big Data Analytics
Ulrich Matter
In Big Data Analytics – Grundlagen, Fallbeispiele und Nutzungspotenziale, May 2021