Meet the Press: How Voters and Politicians Respond to Newspaper Entry and Exit

Abstract

This paper uses an original dataset covering the presence of local news in medium-large Italian cities in the period 1993-2010 to evaluate the effects of newspaper entry and exit on electoral participation, political selection, and government efficiency. Exploiting discrete changes in the number of newspapers, we show that newspaper entry increases turnout in municipal elections, the reelection probability of the incumbent mayor, and the efficiency of the municipal government. We do not find any effect on the selection of politicians. Competition plays a relevant role, as the effects are not limited to the first newspaper entry.JEL classification: L82, D72, H70.

Habit Formation in Voting: Evidence from Rainy Elections

“…Turnout shows no relation to rainfall on the day of the next presidential election, and it also shows no relation to daily rainfall within the two weeks before and after the current election day. These results confirm that only rainfall that fell precisely on the current and previous election 2 Prior empirical research in economics has focused predominantly on the contemporaneous effects of pivot probabilities (Agranov 2012;Hoffman, Morgan, and Raymond 2013), voting costs (Charles and Stephens 2013), and the media (Stromberg 2004;Gentzkow 2006;DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007;Enikolopov, Petrova, and Zhuravskaya 2011;Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson 2011;Drago, Nannicini, and Sobbrio 2014;Falck, Gold, and Heblich 2014) on turnout.…”

Citizen-editors' endogenous information acquisition and news accuracy

“…Overall, this result points out the presence of a negative relation between the extremism of the ideological preferences of media editors (or, more generally, journalists) and the accuracy of news reports. 21 Hence, the above Corollary sheds light on an issue which has not been addressed in the literature and that represents an additional element to enhance the understanding of the market for news. In particular, the evidence provided by Figure Finally, as expected, when the cost of sampling is higher, editors will make more "errors"…”

“…and given (21) and (22) derived in the proof of Proposition 1, the sign of dE(|ne|) dδ will be equivalent to the one of the following expression:…”

“…23 Notice that what really matters for citizen when deciding whether to access a media outlet's report is not the identity of the editor per se but rather her ideological preferences. As greatly exemplified by Chan and Suen (2008), news media have a clear incentive to make such ideological 21 Notice that moderate editors do not have any higher intrinsic value per se. Moderate editors simply provide a useful benchmark since their perfectly symmetric stopping thresholds correspond to what is usually considered as a "fair and balanced" news report.…”

Social Media and Corruption

“…Section II describes our data. Section III 7 Most of this literature is focused on the impact of media on people's behavior and policies in democracies such as the United States (e.g., DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007;Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson 2011;Snyder and Strömberg 2010;Eisensee and Strömberg 2007;and Chiang and Knight 2011) or Italy (e.g., Barone, D'Acunto, and Narciso 2015; Drago, Nannincini, and Sobbrio 2014;and Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei 2015). For a thorough overview of this literature, see DellaVigna and Gentzkow (2010), Prat and Strömberg (2013), Enikolopov and Petrova (2015), and Strömberg (2015).…”