K262, CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Please join us for the CAPS Seminar with Jim Snyder, Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science, Harvard. Prof. Snyder will be presenting work in progress, a collaboration with Michael Auslen and Shigeo Hirano.
“Newspapers, News Deserts and Political Behavior in Local Elections”
Abstract: Conventional wisdom is that local newspaper coverage affects political participation in U.S. elections. This is consistent with political economy models of information and turnout. The empirical evidence that this relationship exists in the U.S. tends to focus on daily newspapers and voting behavior in federal or state elections. In recent years the rapid growth in news deserts” — communities without a local newspaper — is largely driven by the closure of weekly newspapers. In this paper, we use two newly assembled datasets of newspaper closures and local election returns to examine whether the recent growth in newspaper deserts has affected political participation and voting patterns. The first is a dataset of daily and weekly local newspaper closures by year for the period 1996 to 2021. The second is a dataset of thousands of election returns for a wide range of county and municipal offices across multiple states during this period — including elections for non-partisan and partisan offices. We examine both overall turnout and relative turnout in these local elections focusing attention on the races where newspaper information is expected to have the largest effect — races for non-partisan offices. We find no evidence that the number of newspapers are strongly and positively related to political participation. We also find no significant evidence that the number of local newspapers is correlated with a growth in split-ticket voting.
The CAPS Seminar is a monthly series highlighting research by CAPS affiliates and fostering discussion among members of our community.
Please note, this event will be held in-person, and in-person events are open to only Harvard affiliates at this time. Refreshments will be provided following the discsussion.