The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV
School of Economics and Finance The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV Ruben Durante, Paolo Pinotti and Andrea Tesei Working Paper No. 762 December 201 5 ISSN 1473-0278 The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV∗ Ruben Durantey Paolo Pinottiz Andrea Teseix July 2015 Abstract We investigate the political impact of entertainment television in Italy over the past thirty years by exploiting the staggered intro- duction of Silvio Berlusconi's commercial TV network, Mediaset, in the early 1980s. We find that individuals in municipalities that had access to Mediaset prior to 1985 - when the network only featured light entertainment programs - were significantly more likely to vote for Berlusconi's party in 1994, when he first ran for office. This effect persists for almost two decades and five elections, and is es- pecially pronounced for heavy TV viewers, namely the very young and the old. We relate the extreme persistence of the effect to the relative incidence of these age groups in the voting population, and explore different mechanisms through which early exposure to en- tertainment content may have influenced their political attitudes. Keywords: television, entertainment, voting, political participa- tion, Italy. JEL codes: L82, D72, Z13 ∗We thank Alberto Alesina, Antonio Ciccone, Filipe Campante, Ruben Enikolopov, Greg Huber, Brian Knight, Valentino Larcinese, Marco Manacorda, Torsten Persson, Barbara Petrongolo, Andrei Shleifer, Francesco Sobbrio, Joachim Voth, David Weil, Katia Zhuravskaya, and seminar participants at Bocconi, CREI, NYU, MIT, Sciences Po, Brown, Dartmouth, Sorbonne, WZB, Surrey, Queen Mary, Yale, EIEF, LSE, Namur, and participants at the 2013 AEA Meeting, the 2013 EUI Conference on Communica- tions and Media Markets, and the Lisbon Meeting on Institutions and Political Economy for helpful comments.
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