Giacomo Manferdini

I am a political economist, and in my work I draw on behavioral economics to study how communication—and especially narratives—shapes beliefs and behaviors that are economically and politically consequential. My job market paper asks how politicians can seek shape the causal accounts voters use to evaluate them using a causal rhetoric—language linking political actions to outcomes through blame and credit. It measures this rhetoric in about 4 million congressional tweets and show that it generates political returns concentrated in blame. My broader research studies how narratives, memory, and information provision interact with cognitive constraints to shape beliefs and behavior in political and economic settings.

JOB MARKET PAPER

Blameocracy: Causal Rhetoric in Politics
 Democratic politics requires voters to infer how political actions map into outcomes, yet these causal links are often unclear, giving politicians scope to shape voters' causal accounts. This paper studies the supply and returns of causal rhetoric in politics: politicians' language linking political actions to outcomes through blame and credit. We fine-tune a language model to measure its use in 4.2 million congressional tweets spanning 2012-2023. Causal rhetoric is central to politicians' communication: it accounts for more than one third of tweets, is the language of political disagreement, and rises over time. The political returns of causal rhetoric are concentrated in blame. Combining campaign contributions with quasi-exogenous geographic variation in Twitter adoption, we find that exposure to blame has the largest effects on small donations. Using voting intentions from survey data and an event-study design around blame-only and credit-only days, we find that politicians' support rises after blame-only days. Additional evidence suggests that causal rhetoric, especially blame, may slant the causal accounts voters receive by turning complex economic mechanisms into underqualified but plausible, politically convenient claims.

PUBLICATIONS

• Coarse Memory and Plausible Narrative (with Francesco Bilotta), American Economic Journal: Micreconomics (Forthcoming). [SSRN version]

WORKING PAPERS

• Persuading with Memory.
• Policy Implementation and Congressional Rhetoric: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act (with Francesco Bilotta).

WORK IN PROGRESS

• Information Campaigns, Peer Interactions, and Beliefs about Carbon Taxes (with Stefano Carattini, Pamela Giustinelli, and Marcella Veronesi). [pre-analysis plan]