Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior

Darr, Joshua P.; Hitt, Matthew P.; Dunaway, Johanna

doi:10.1093/joc/jqy051

Cited by 127 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Beyond this focus on overall coverage, there is mixed evidence on the effects of these staff cuts for particular types of coverage (i.e., local political news) and based on the types of reporters involved in them (i.e., reporters with political beats). On both counts, estimates are in the anticipated direction, but there are not detectable differences across the different newspaper samples and measurement approaches used in this study, pointing to the need for future work that examines these claims using larger samples A growing body of research considers the political consequences of newspaper shutdowns and changes in local media ownership (Mondak 1995, Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido 2013, Shaker 2014, Darr et al 2018, Martin and McCrain 2019. This study broadens the implications of this work on media decline by isolating reduced reporting resources as a factor that shapes the provision of political news coverage for the many newspapers that continue to operate and among newspapers with a variety of ownership structures.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Paper Cuts: How Reporting Resources Affect Political News Coverage

Peterson¹

2020

American J Political Sci

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Media outlets provide crucial inputs into the democratic process, yet they face increasingly severe economic challenges. I study how a newly salient manifestation of this pressure, reduced reporting capacity, influences political coverage. Focusing on newspapers in the United States, where industry-wide employment fell over 40% between 2007 and 2015, I use panel data to assess the relationship between reporting capacity and political coverage. Staff cuts substantially decrease the amount of political coverage newspapers provide. Across different samples and measurement approaches, a typical cutback to a newspaper's reporting staff reduces its annual political coverage by between 300 and 500 stories. These political news declines happen against the backdrop of similar reductions in nonpolitical coverage, meaning the share of newspaper articles focused on politics remains stable over this period. This demonstrates that economic pressure affects the political information environment by shaping the media's capacity to cover politics.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Paper Cuts: How Reporting Resources Affect Political News Coverage

Peterson¹

2020

American J Political Sci

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“…On the other hand, it did so in an unbalanced way that may have advantaged congressional Republicans. Whatever the case, we provide additional evidence for the variety of ways in which the news media have contributed to the "nationalization" of American politics (Hopkins 2018), by increasing the role played by national partisan politics in congressional elections (Darr, Hitt, and Dunaway 2018;Hayes and Lawless 2018;Trussler 2018) and casting political choices in more polarized terms (Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar 2017;Martin and McCrain 2019).…”

mentioning

confidence: 87%

Strategic Candidate Entry and Congressional Elections in the Era of Fox News

Arceneaux

Dunaway²,

Johnson

et al. 2019

American J Political Sci

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Elections are designed to give voters the ability to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. For this to work, voters must be presented with credible alternatives from which to choose. In the United States, as in other weak‐party systems, the decision to challenge an incumbent representative rests with individual, strategic‐minded politicians who carefully weigh the available information. We investigate the role that one source of information—partisan media—plays in shaping electoral competition. We hypothesize that the haphazard expansion of the conservative Fox News Channel in the decade after its 1996 launch influenced congressional elections by affecting the decision calculus of high‐quality potential candidates. Using congressional district‐level data on the local availability of Fox News, we find that Fox News altered Republican potential candidates' perceptions about the vulnerability of Democratic incumbents, thereby changing their entry patterns.

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“…Further support for our claims about the importance of local newspapers is evident in the recent research on the consequences of the contemporary declines in local newspapers in the United States. These declines are associated with falling civic participation (53,54), greater polarization (55,56), and lower quality of governance (57,58).…”

Section: Mechanisms: Post Offices and Local Newspapersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early investments in state capacity promote persistently higher levels of social capital

Jensen

Ramey

2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Social capital has been shown to positively influence a multitude of economic, political, and social outcomes. Yet the factors that affect long-run social capital formation remain poorly understood. Recent evidence suggests that early state formation, especially investments in state capacity, are positively associated with higher levels of contemporary social capital and other prosocial attitudes. The channels by which early state capacity leads to greater social capital over time are even less understood. We contribute to both questions using the spatial and temporal expansion of the US postal network during the 19th century. We first show that county-level variation in post office density is highly correlated with a bevy of historical and contemporary indicators of social capital (e.g., associational memberships, civic participation, health, and crime). This finding holds even when controlling for historical measures of development and contemporary measures of income, inequality, poverty, education, and race. Second, we provide evidence of an informational mechanism by which this early investment in infrastructural capacity affected long-run social capital formation. Namely, we demonstrate that the expansion of the postal network in the 19th century strongly predicts the historical and contemporary location of local newspapers, which were the primary mode of impersonal information transmission during this period. Our evidence sheds light on the role of the state in both the origins of social capital and the channels by which it persists. Our findings also suggest that the consequences of the ongoing decline in local newspapers will negatively affect social capital.

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Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior

Cited by 127 publications

References 58 publications

Paper Cuts: How Reporting Resources Affect Political News Coverage

Paper Cuts: How Reporting Resources Affect Political News Coverage

Strategic Candidate Entry and Congressional Elections in the Era of Fox News

Early investments in state capacity promote persistently higher levels of social capital

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