'The Wolf of Main Street: Electoral Consequences of Animal Attacks' (AsPredicted #75831)
Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 2 authors.
Pre-registered on 09/30/2021 12:53 AM (PT)
1) Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? H1: Wolf attacks lower the vote share of the Green party
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. The vote share of the Green Party across federal and state elections at the municipality level.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? Treatment: A municipality, j, has experienced a wolf attack in election-period, t.
Control: A municipality, j, has not experienced a wolf attack in election-period, t.
Treatment continuous: The number of wolf attacks in municipality, j, in election period, t.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We estimate the following two-way FE panel model:
Y_{jt} = α_{j} +y_{t} + beta X_{j} + e_{jt}
where Y is the vote share of the Green Party in municipality, j, in election period, t, and X is the treatment indicator (coded as explained above).
- The treatment only applies for one election period.
- In an alternative model, we will code municipalities as "indefinitely treated" once a wolf has appeared (akin to a staggered diff-in-diff treatment).
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. None.
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size? No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. We include all German municipalities (harmonized at the 2020 geometries) in our sample, which amounts to 10,796 municipalities as of 12/31/2020. We include all federal elections starting in 1990 and all state elections starting in 2000.
We will measure wolf attacks based on publicly available information provided by the environmental authorities of the federal states. NB: in some states, this data does not exist because there are virtually no wolf attacks. These municipalities will then be coded as 0.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) We will also test the following hypotheses (in an exploratory manner):
H2: Wolf attacks raise the vote share of the far-right AfD
H3: Wolf attacks increase (environmental) polarization*
H4: Wolf attacks increase turnout
*we code polarization as both the anti-environmental parties (AfD) as well as the pro-environmental parties (Greens) gaining votes at the expense of the remaining parties.
