Title:      Exploiting a Rare Shift in Communication Flows to
Document News Media Persuasion: The 1997 United Kingdom General
Election

Authors:    Jonathan Ladd, Gabriel Lenz

Entrydate:  2008-07-30 16:36:47

Keywords:   Media persuasion, endorsements, campaigns,
elections, matching, causal inference

Abstract:   Using panel data and matching techniques, we exploit
a rare change in communication flows -- the endorsement switch to
the Labour Party by several prominent British newspapers before
the 1997 United Kingdom general election -- to study the
persuasive power of the news media. These unusual events provide
an opportunity to test for news media persuasion while avoiding
methodological pitfalls that have plagued previous studies. By
comparing readers of newspapers that switched endorsements to
similar individuals who did not read these newspapers, we
estimate that these papers persuaded a considerable share of
their readers to vote for Labour. Depending on the statistical
approach, the point estimates vary from about 10 percent to as
high as 25 percent of readers. These findings provide rare,
compelling evidence that the news media exert a powerful
influence on mass political behavior.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=813

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