Television and Voter Turnout*

“Expression (7) is easily interpretable.”

“To address the identification challenge, we control for differential trends in outcomes between PMC counties and non-PMC counties depending on the key determinants in the selection of PMC counties, a strategy used by Gentzkow (2006).”

“Although a firm's geographic proximity may influence an investor's willingness to hold or trade its stock, other factors may generate cross-region differences in investor interest.”

“A growing literature in economics studies the effects of the news media on public policy (e.g., Stromberg 2004, Stromberg and Snyder forthcoming),political beliefs and behavior (Prior 2005, Gentzkow 2006, DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007, Knight andChiang 2008), and social capital (Olken 2009).”

“voter turnout (George and Waldfogel, forthcoming; DellaVigna and Kaplan, 2006; Gentzkow, 2006).”

“In this case, rational viewers will not fully discount information provided by the media and use it for Bayesian updating of their beliefs about political parties (e.g., Gentzkow and Shapiro 2006; Petrova 2008; Scott Gehlbach and Sonin 2009).”

“Amongst others, Chiang and Knight (2011) find positive effects of unexpected newspaper endorsements on vote shares for the endorsed candidate, Gentzkow (2006) finds decreased voter turnout from television access, Gerber et al. (2009) find positive effects of newspaper exposure, regardless of slant, on Democratic vote…”

“Bursztyn et al. (2017) find that media coverage of close elections increases voter turnout, while Gavazza et al. (2018) show that broadband diffusion decreased voter turnout in the United Kingdom (see also Gentzkow, 2006; Manacorda and Tesei, 2016).”

“This may be driven by both irrational confirmatory bias (Lord et al.1979) and rational inferences about quality by consumers with heterogeneous priors (Gentzkow & Shapiro 2006).”

“To address this concern, we follow an approach used by Gentzkow (2006), in which key determinants of the TCZ selection are first identi-fied and then post-treatment variations in the outcome variable generated by these key determinants are flexibly controlled in the regression.”

“Media penetration has been found to influence redistributive spending [Strömberg 1999, 2004], government accountability [Besley and Burgess 2002], voter turnout [Gentzkow 2006 and Strömberg 1999, 2004], and voting patterns [Della Vigna and Kaplan 2005].”

“, Strömberg (2004), DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007), Gentzkow (2006), Gerber, Karlan, Bergan (2009), Knight and Chiang (2009), Gentzkow et al.”

“Across counties, per-capita manufacturing output (our proxy for income) is significantly and positively correlated with the number of newspapers, and entries and exits of newspapers are associated with corresponding trends in output.”

“…supporting a certain political ideology (cf. DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007; Durante and Knight, 2011) or the media might concentrate on political issues of general interest and crowd out local topics since the media serve increasingly integrated markets (Snyder and Strömberg, 2010; Gentzkow, 2006).”

“Gentzkow (2006) estimates that the increasing use of television in 1950–70 reduced House turnout in the non-South by 5.6 percent in off-year elections and 3.1 percent in presidential elections.”

“While there is some supportive evidence for this thesis from media studies in rich countries (Gentzkow, 2006; Stromberg, 2004; Snyder and Stromberg, 2010), the responsiveness of voter turnout to priming exercises suggests that this is unlikely to provide the main explanation for turnout patterns in rich or poor countr…”

“Gentzkow and Shapiro (2004) argue that media in Arabic countries biased against the US reinforces antiAmerican sentiment in the population.”

“…broadly related to studies of news media persuasion on such topics as political opinion (Gerber et al., 2009), political participation (Cagé, 2019; Gentzkow, 2006), voting (Chiang and Knight, 3One exception is Martin and Yurukoglu (2017) who measure a persuasive effect of news viewership on…”

“…and social capital, with a special focus on television and the Internet (see, e.g., Bruni & Stanca, 2008; Frey, Benesch, & Stutzer, 2007; Gentzkow, 2006; Gentzkow, Shapiro, & Sinkinson, 2011; Jensen & Oster, 2009; Kearney & Levine, 2015; La Ferrara, Chong, & Duryea, 2012; Misra, Cheng,…”

“In contrast, the introduction of television which has less political coverage leads to a decline in political knowledge and thus turnout rates (Gentzkow, 2006).”

“To alleviate this concern, as we discussed earlier, following Gentzkow (2006) and Lu et al. (2017), we identify and control the determinants of the pollution targets.”

“To provide a better sense of the magnitudes of our coe¢ cients and standard errors, we can contrast them with experimental …ndings in which children exposed to an intervention as preschoolers are followed into adolescence.”

“…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…”

“In the U.S. context, Gentzkow (2006) shows that the introduction of television itself reduced voter turnout in congressional elections by about 2 percentage points per decade (f = 4.4), while Gentzkow et al. (2011) find that, historically, availability of at least one newspaper per county increased…”

“A relevant case for educational outcomes is the identification strategy used by Gentzkow (2006), which exploits the fact that television licenses were granted in waves with interruptions in the licensing process.”

“The present-day media market boundaries defined by the Nielsen Company (known as designated market areas — DMAs) approximate the geographic reach of television stations ’ signals in the 1950s and 1960s (Gentzkow 2006).”

“As only two candidates run 4 Other papers that make use of quasi-randomized empirical strategies, are: Gerber et al. (2000), Gentzkow (2006), Hastings et al. (2007); and Funk (forthcoming).”

“30A large literature documents the effect of exposure to television on political (Gentzkow, 2006; Della Vigna & Kaplan, 2007; Enikolopov, Petrova, & Zhuravskaya, 2011; Della Vigna et al., 2014) and social (Jensen & Oster, 2009; Olkean, 2009; La Ferrara, Chong, & Duryea, 2012) outcomes.”

“New approaches of this question include micro-oriented studies isolating specific channels through which a development dynamic was durably established (see for instance Nunn (2008) on slave trade, Huillery (2009) on colonial investments, Dell (2010) on forced mining-labor, Alesina, Easterly, and Matuszeski (2011) on i…”

“First, a growing body of papers study the role of media in politics: Strömberg (2004b), Gentzkow (2006), Larcinese (2007), DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007), Ferraz and Finan (2008), Prat and Strömberg (2005), Snyder and Strömberg (2010), Enikolopov, Petrova, and Zhuravskaya (2011), Gentzkow,…”

“Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson (2011) analyzed historical data from 1869 to 2004, with a particular focus on the 1869–1928 period, and showed that the presence of a local daily newspaper raised presidential and congressional election turnout. Trounstine (2009) found that incumbent advantage in city council elections…”

“Gentzkow (2006) finds a large impact of the expansion of television between 1940 and 1972 on voter turnout.”

“In particular, consistent with the analysis on the drivers of newspaper entry and exit that will be discussed in the next section, this increase appears mostly pronounced in the provinces where there were fewer newspapers providing local news to start with.(23)”

“Gentzkow, and J. M. Shapiro (2019). Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization.”

“This argument is consistent with empirical evidence of a negative role of television exposure in social relations (Bruni and Stanca, 2008), civic engagement (Olken, 2009), and voter turnout (Gentzkow, 2006).”

“On one hand, media supervision may improve political transparency and governance; on the other hand, media capture and media bias can also have a negative effect on the election (DellaVigna and Kaplan, 2007; Durante and Knight, 2012; Gentzkow, 2006); see Prat and Strömberg (2011) for a thorough review.”

“On the way the market for news affects political outcomes, see among others George and Waldfogel (2006), Gentzkow (2006), Snyder and Stromberg (2010), Gavazza et al. (2019) Cagé (2020).”

“A large literature has explored the political effects of information supplied by the media (see Stromberg 2001, Gentzkow 2006, Gentzkow et al 2011, and the surveys by Stromberg 2015, Prat and Stromberg 2013 and Della Vigna 2010). In terms of our theoretical framework, all these contributions endogenize the cost of acq…”

“…and Tabellini’s (2000) textbook formulation of probabilistic voting as a point of departure, we present a game of complementarity between the information 3 See also Gentzkow (2006) and Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson (2011) on turnout and DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) on biased coverage and voting.”

“This descriptive evidence is consistent with C-SPAN motivating the use of more emotional rhetoric, in line with previous work on how television has reshaped politics (Gentzkow, 2006; DellaVigna and Kaplan, 2007; Martin and Yurukoglu, 2017; Durante et al., 2019).”

“As political information has been tied to both civic engagement and voting behavior (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Gentzkow 2006; Larcinese 2007; Lassen 2005; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995), we further expect the lower levels of voter information to result in lower levels of turnout in…”

“Considering different media outlets, a number of papers have found that media access increases political participation (Strömberg, 2004b; Gentzkow, 2006; Oberholzer-Gee and Waldfogel, 2009; Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido, 2013; Banerjee et al., 2010; Snyder and Strömberg, 2010; Gentzkow et al., 2011).”

“…on a diverse set of outcome variables (e.g., Besley and Burgess 2002, DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007, Enikolopov et al. 2011, Gerber et al. 2009, Gentzkow 2006, Gentzkow et al. 2011, Oberholzer-Gee and Waldfogel 2009, Strömberg 2004, Yanagizawa-Drott 2014; and, for a review of this type of…”

“The empirical …ndings of Gentzkow (2006) and Snyder and Strömberg (2010) suggest that local newspapers are the main source of information about state and local policy, which would imply L > S .”

“…our persuasion rate are 2.94-4.23 p.p., much closer to persuasion rates observed in the literature for newspaper endorsement (Chiang and Knight (2011), 6 p.p. for unexpected endorsements, or 2 p.p. for expected endorsement), or turnout e ects of entry of television (4.4 p.p., Gentzkow (2006)).”

“viewers unexposed to news proposed by (Gentzkow, 2006) and Prior (2005), which requires that Berlusconi supporters are more likely to sort into digital TV than others.”

“In particular, the media are more likely to report on centralized policies because they concern a broader audience (Gentzkow 2006; Snyder and Strömberg 2010).”

“Prat and Strömberg find that commercial TV news attracted mostly young people and those previously not well informed. Moreover, they find that those who started watching commercial TV news increased their levels of political knowledge and voter participation more than those who did not. This result by Prat and Strömbe…”

“First, following Gentzkow (2006), we carefully characterize the potential determinants, 1998iZ , of the changes in FDI regulations upon the WTO accession.”

“Moreover, since the more 1See, among the others, Strömberg, 2004a; Gentzkow, 2006; Eisensee and Strömberg, 2007; OberholzerGee and Waldfogel, 2009; Snyder and Strömberg, 2010.”