The cost of gendered attitudes on a female candidate: Evidence from Google Trends

Abstract

How much can negative attitudes towards women affect voting for a female candidate on a major election? We measure gender animus by calculating a proxy based on Google search queries that include gender-charged language. Such approach likely elicits socially sensitive attitudes by limiting the concern of social censoring, circumventing usual difficulties associated with survey-based measurements. We compare the proxy to Hillary Clinton's vote share in the presidential election of 2016, controlling for the vote share of the previous Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. Our results indicate that a one standard deviation increase in our proxy is associated with a 2 percentage points relative loss for Hillary and suggest that online-based observable behavior can be useful for measuring different kinds of hard-to-measure social attitudes.

Economic analysis through alternative data and big data techniques: what do they tell about Brazil?

“…Five studies that use data extracted from Google Trends in the economic analysis have been done by Brazilian authors. However, three of these studies have been dedicated to economic analyses for other countries and not for Brazil (Perlin et al 2017;Corbi and Picchetti 2020;Piccoli and Castro 2021). Google Trends data is used by Neto and Candido (2021) to assess and predict loans to households and by Piccoli (2021) to predict currency prices in a speculative attack.…”

Careful what you say: The effect of manipulative information on the 2013 Czech presidential run-off election

“…After the presidential debate, topics surrounding the Beneš decrees (laws named after President Edvard Beneš that provided legal ground for the property confiscation and expulsion of ethnic Germans) and property restitutions escalated in the media and public discourse. Online-based behaviour illustrates people's concern (Corbi and Picchetti, 2020). Figure 1 shows a considerable increase in the magnitude of Google searches for the Beneš decrees shortly after the presidential debate.…”

Economic analysis through alternative data and big data techniques: what do they tell about Brazil?

“…Five studies that use data extracted from Google Trends in the economic analysis have been done by Brazilian authors. However, three of these studies have been dedicated to economic analyses for other countries and not for Brazil (Perlin et al 2017 ; Corbi and Picchetti 2020 ; Piccoli and Castro 2021 ). Google Trends data are used by Neto and Candido ( 2021 ) to assess and predict loans to households and by Piccoli ( 2021 ) to predict currency prices in a speculative attack.…”