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Political Power of the Press in the Weimar Republic∗

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Political Power of the Press in the Weimar Republic∗ POLITICAL POWER OF THE PRESS IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC∗ BANG DINH NGUYENy Abstract. This paper studies the political power of the press in the Weimar Republic (1918{1933). Using a dataset of 135 daily newspapers in Berlin during this period, I ex- amine how changes in the circulation figures of partisan newspapers affected voter turnout, party's vote shares and mass political polarization at three levels: federal, state and city council elections. My empirical strategy exploits the variation in the development of the urban commuter rail system across 20 historical districts of Berlin, which influenced the circulation of newspapers in each district. My analysis shows that an increase in newspaper circulation significantly induced higher turnout in 14 outer districts of Berlin, with ten thou- sand additional copies of newspapers increasing turnout by approximately 0.11 percentage points, and gave rise to a higher degree of mass polarization. In addition, ten thousand additional copies of newspapers supporting a party led to 0.31 percentage point increase in its vote share in federal elections. The effect was stronger for federal elections than for state elections and city council elections. Most importantly, the electoral influence of news- papers was driven by tabloids and mass newspapers, and not by elite political newspapers. Among the anti-Republican press, the right-wing press exerted a strong influence in federal elections, whereas the power of the communist press was negligible. Keywords: Press, Newspapers, Politics, Election Outcome, Railways JEL classification: D72, L82, N44, N74, N84 Date: November 27, 2019. Click here for the most recent version. yStern School of Business, New York University. Email: [email protected]. ∗I thank my advisors { Petra Moser, Walker Hanlon and Lu´ısCabral { for their guidance and encouragement. I also received helpful comments from Felipe Alves, Roxana Mihet, Juergen Reichert, Lawrence White and participants at the NYU Applied Micro Lunch Workshop, EHES Congress 2019 and EHA Meeting 2019. 1 1. Introduction The question of how mass media affects political outcomes has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention recently. A large strand of literature finds significant persuasive effects of modern media outlets on party's vote shares (DellaVigna and Kaplan, 2007; Gerber et al., 2009; Enikolopov et al., 2011).1 Several scholars attempt to study the political influence of newspapers in the 19th and early 20th centuries when print media was still the most predominant form of media. Gentzkow et al.(2011), for example, conduct a historical study of the effect of US daily newspapers on electoral politics from 1869 to 1928 and find that the existence of partisan newspapers increased voter turnout but had no significant effect on party's vote shares. How robust are these results to different political systems and different institutions in other countries? This paper examines the case of the Weimar Republic, the fourteen-year period starting in 1918 and ending in 1933, when Hitler rose to power. In Weimar Germany, the national legislative body { the Reichstag { was filled with a large number of middle-sized and small political parties. A pure proportional representation system was implemented, specifying that each party received the same percentage of seats in the Reichstag as the percentage of its vote share. This stood in stark contrast to the United States, where a winner-take-all system has been used for a long time as the basis for political decision-making in the two-party system. In addition, basic attitudes towards journalism in the Weimar Republic were strikingly different from those in Anglo-Saxon countries (Eksteins, 1975). Whereas in the United States and Britain the most important goal for an aspiring journalist was to report facts with an impersonal, objective approach, in Germany journalists were encouraged to express opinions and judgments in their articles, to become participants in controversies rather than to remain spectators. Arthur Koestler { foreign editor of the B.Z. am Mittag { reflected in his memoirs: [German journalism's] starting point was the correspondent's Weltanschauung, and the political philosophy of the paper for which he worked. His job was not to report the news and facts. but to use facts as pretexts for venting his opinions and passing oracular judgement. `Facts,' a famous German editor said, `are not fit for the reader when served raw; they had to be cooked, chewed and presented in the correspondent's saliva.' (Koestler, 1952) Another distinct characteristic of the Weimar press was the fragmentation and decentraliza- tion in the newspaper market. Most German newspapers were private enterprises owned by individual families. Each newspaper focused on its own city, and there were neither national newspapers as in Britain (e.g., The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Mail), nor chains owned 1In contrast to other results, Falck et al.(2014) find that the availability of the Internet reduced voter turnout and did not influence party's vote shares in Germany for the election cycle 2004{2008. 2 by one company as in the United States (e.g., the Hearst company had a nationwide string of 28 newspapers by the mid 1920s). Taking the political system, the attitudes towards journalism and the newspaper market structure into consideration, this paper studies the interplay between the press and electoral outcomes in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. This period in German history provides an excellent context to study the political role of the press, since in the 1920s newspapers were the predominant medium of mass communication in Germany and constituted the only available window on politics. Furthermore, German newspapers had a long tradition of adhering to a political cause. The Revolution of 1848 resulted in the foundation of a large number of newspapers with a clearly defined political agenda. After World War I, most German newspapers had to reconsider their politics. Each newspaper listed its political stance and explicitly encouraged readers to vote for a particular party on election days. See Figure1 for an example. Surprisingly, studies of the Berlin press have not been able to establish a connection between newspapers and electoral behavior (Fulda, 2009). This result is worth reconsidering, since Weimar contemporaries claimed that they derived their political knowledge through information mediated by the press, and reading newspapers was their everyday activity on public transport. As Georg Bernhard { editor-in-chief of the Vossische Zeitung { put it, a German viewed his favorite newspaper as \not merely a source of information, but also an organ of instruction. The German believes what his paper tells him. Men to whom much space is devoted are to him great men." (Bernhard, 1929) A careful examination of these studies reveals that their primary focus was solely on elite political newspapers. These publications were often regarded as official party organs, primarily concerned with high politics and characterized by high subscription fees and low circulation. A remarkable feature of the Berlin press in this period is, however, the rising popularity of two alternatives to these old-fashioned political papers: mass newspapers and tabloids. By investigating a comprehensive dataset of the Berlin daily press which consists of all these three types of newspapers, I re-examine the relationship between the press and elections in the Weimar Republic. This quantitative approach complements previous historical studies, whose the results had been based on the analysis of case studies, commentaries, letters and papers from individual politicians or editors. To estimate the causal effect of newspaper circulation on political outcomes, any potential endogeneity problem needs to be addressed. For example, a district with a larger volume of newspapers would have a higher turnout due to a higher level of education whose data may not be available, instead of a direct causal effect of newspapers. As an empirical strategy, I exploit the variation in the development of the urban rail system across 20 historical districts 3 of Berlin. In particular, I use the number of railway stations in a district as an instrumental variable for the circulation of newspapers in that district. The growth of Berlin railway system played an essential role in improving the collection of news, expediting distribution and as well as lowering the delivery cost of newspapers; therefore, it can serve as a good proxy for newspaper circulation. Preston(1999) explains that railways allowed a quicker and more efficient distribution network to be created, especially in rural areas, as newspapers could quickly be sent in bulk to agents in towns with a railway station, and then be sent, probably by road, to agents in nearby settlements. See Figure2 for different channels of distributing newspapers from a publishing house to the readers, where railroads were a crucial means of transportation. Jones(1993, pp.105-106) studies the history of journalism in Wales and asserts that the development of the railway network was the \single most important contribution to the growth of a mass newspaper market". This also reflected the situation in Weimar Berlin. New railway stations not only improved the distribution of newspapers but also fostered new venues for selling them. Bookshops at railway stations are a case in point. They had became integral features of the modern landscape from the beginning of the 20th century. The most popular reading materials to be sold in railways stations were newspapers and journals, rather than books, which are generally heavy and take up a great deal of space. Remarkably, these bookshops strived to cater to readers from all social strata.2 These distribution outlets, which saw themselves as politically neutral entities addressing an anonymous target readership without any regard for religion, status or political affiliation, and which set out to satisfy all the reading requirements of `Mr Everyman' (Herr Jedermann), sought to appeal to the broadest common denominator of the varied public passing through railway stations (Reuveni, 2002).
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