The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV∗
The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV∗ Ruben Durantey Paolo Pinottiz Andrea Teseix August 2018 Abstract We study the political impact of commercial television in Italy exploiting the stag- gered introduction of Berlusconi's private TV network, Mediaset, in the early 1980s. We find that individuals with early access to Mediaset all-entertainment content were more likely to vote for Berlusconi's party in 1994, when he first ran for office. The effect persists for five elections and is driven by heavy TV viewers, namely the very young and the elderly. Regarding possible mechanisms, we find that individ- uals exposed to entertainment TV as children were less cognitively sophisticated and civic-minded as adults, and ultimately more vulnerable to Berlusconi's populist rhetoric. Keywords: Entertainment TV, Voting, Cognitive Abilities, Civic Engagement JEL codes: L82, D72, Z13 ∗We thank Alberto Alesina, Filipe Campante, Antonio Ciccone, Stefano DellaVigna, Ruben Enikolopov, Ray Fisman, Greg Huber, Brian Knight, Valentino Larcinese, Marco Manacorda, Torsten Persson, Barbara Petrongolo, Andrei Shleifer, Francesco Sobbrio, Joachim Voth, David Weil, Katia Zhu- ravskaya, and seminar participants at Bocconi, CREI, NYU, MIT, Sciences Po, Brown, Dartmouth, Sorbonne, WZB, Surrey, Queen Mary, Yale, EIEF, LSE, Namur, Bank of Italy, Warwick, UPF, and participants at the AEA Meetings, the EUI Conference on Communications and Media Markets, and the Lisbon Meeting on Institutions and Political Economy for helpful comments. We are very grateful to Ben Olken and Ruben Enikolopov for their help with the ITM software. We thank Nicola D'Amelio and Giuseppe Piraino for their assistance with data collection and Laura Litvine for her outstanding help with the digitization of the transmitters data.
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