Broadband Internet and Political Participation Evidence for Germany Nina Czernich Ifo Working Paper No. 104 June 2011 An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded from the Ifo website www.cesifo-group.de. Ifo Working Paper No. 104 Broadband Internet and Political Participation Evidence for Germany Abstract Previous studies found the introduction of the today well established media radio and television to affect political participation. This paper evaluates the effect of the relatively recent introduction of a new medium, broadband internet. OLS results suggest a positive association between DSL availability and voter participation across German municipalities. However, the roll-out of DSL networks is not random. The paper exploits the fact that DSL availability depends on a municipality’s distance to the nearest interconnection point to the existing voice-telephony network. Instrumen- tal-variable results using this distance to predict DSL availability confirm the effect of DSL availability on voter participation. JEL Code: D72, L96, O33. Keywords: Broadband internet, political economics, media, voting behaviour. Nina Czernich Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich Poschingerstr. 5 81679 Munich, Germany Phone: +49(0)89/9224-1309
[email protected] The research underlying this paper has been partially supported by Deutsche Telekom AG and the Leibniz Gemeinschaft. Comments by Stefan Bauernschuster, Oliver Falck, Tobias Kretschmer, Guido Schwerdt, Joachim Winter and Ludger Woessmann are gratefully acknowledged. 1 Introduction Today, parties regard online presence as an important part of their public relations and campaigns. The probably most often cited example for a successful online campaign is the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008.