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Opposition Media and Political Accountability: Evidence from Venezuela

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Opposition Media and Political Accountability: Evidence from Venezuela OPPOSITION MEDIA AND POLITICAL ACCOUNTABILITY: EVIDENCE FROM VENEZUELA∗ DOROTHY KRONICKy JOHN MARSHALLz MAY 2019 Muffling an opposition media outlet entails a tradeoff for competitive authoritarian regimes. On one hand, reducing critical coverage and inducing self-censorship from other outlets could boost popular support; on the other, removing popular program- ming might fuel opposition. We formalize this tradeoff in the context of Hugo Chavez’s´ decision not to renew the broadcasting license of what was then Venezuela’s most pop- ular television station, RCTV. Our difference-in-differences design compares voters who lost access to RCTV—because they had televisions but no cable—to voters who had cable and therefore did not lose RCTV. We find that voters who lost RCTV differ- entially sanctioned Chavez´ at the polls, indicating that the sanctioning effect dominates the effect of changes in news consumption and reporting biases. Despite this cost, our model rationalizes Chavez’s´ decision: gradual, favorable shifts in the editorial lines of other outlets likely outweighed these acute electoral costs. Qualitative evidence supports this interpretation. [Preliminary and incomplete.] ∗We thank Matthew Dodier, Justin Grimmer, Alyssa Huberts, Horacio Larreguy, Anna Mysliwiec, Pia Raffler, Awa Ambra Seck, and conference and workshop participants at Harvard and MPSA for valuable comments. yDepartment of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania. Email: [email protected]. zDepartment of Political Science, Columbia University. Email: [email protected]. 1 1 Introduction For politicians in competitive authoritarian regimes, muffling an opposition media outlet entails a delicate tradeoff. On one hand, eliminating a source of negative coverage could boost elec- toral support. Indeed, empirical studies in varied contexts—developed and developing countries, democracies and electoral autocracies—find that news media affect voters’ beliefs and political behavior, typically swaying voters toward the outlet’s editorial line (e.g. Adena et al. 2015; Chiang and Knight 2011; DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007; DellaVigna et al. 2014; Enikolopov, Petrova and Zhuravskaya 2011; Ferraz and Finan 2008; Kern and Hainmueller 2009; Martin and Yurukoglu 2017; Yanagizawa-Drott 2014). On the other hand, eliminating a source of valued entertainment (or information) could draw sanction at the polls. An influential literature finds that voters punish incumbents for incompetence or misalignment with voters’ interests (e.g. Fearon 1999; Ferejohn 1986). Indeed, voters often sanction incumbents for poor economic outcomes (e.g. Brender and Drazen 2008) and high levels of corruption (e.g. Ferraz and Finan 2008; Larreguy, Marshall and Snyder 2018), while voters often reward incumbents for providing valued goods (e.g. De La O 2015; de Janvry, Gonzalez-Navarro and Sadoulet 2014; Larreguy, Marshall and Trucco 2019; Labonne 2013; Manacorda, Miguel and Vigorito 2011). If voters were to take muffling a media outlet as a negative signal about the incumbent’s future performance, votes lost could outnumber votes gained. We study the electoral consequences of Hugo Chavez’s´ decision not to renew the broadcasting license of RCTV, which was then one of Venezuela’s most-watched and most anti-government television stations. RCTV’s license expired on May 27, 2007; the next day, after more than fifty years on the air, RCTV went dark, and a new, state-sponsored television station (TVes) appeared in its place. RCTV quickly resurrected itself as a cable and satellite outlet, but those without cable or satellite—approximately 65% of households—lost access to the station.1 Moreover, by the time 1Approximately 25% of households had access to cable or satellite television, while around 5% did not 2 it went off the air, RCTV was the only broadcast television station in Venezuela with a strong anti- government editorial line—meaning that voters without cable or satellite lost access to opposition TV news almost entirely.2 The electoral implications of this move are ambiguous, according to the literature cited above. On the one hand, those who lost access to RCTV—namely, the 65% of households with television but no cable or satellite—were suddenly exposed to a more pro-government bundle of news cover- age, which might have swayed them toward Chavez´ at the polls; we call this the news consumption effect. On the other hand, losing RCTV’s entertainment and news programs might have led vot- ers to update negatively about Chavez,´ making those voters more pessimistic about future policy outcomes. We call this the sanctioning effect. The Venezuelan case also highlights a third political consideration that stems from competition among media outlets: the effect of muffling one media outlet on the behavior of its competitors. This second-order effect compound the news consumption effect to work in the incumbent’s favor. In the Venezuelan case, the series of events that culminated in RCTV going off the air led other major broadcast television stations—namely, Venevision´ and Televen—to´ moderate their editorial lines, moving from aggressive anti-Chavez´ reporting toward more neutral or favorable coverage (see Section2). To the best of our knowledge, the endogenous content effect has not been empha- sized in previous literature. We develop a stylized model of the incumbent’s decision to muffle a major media outlet in the face of these competing considerations. In our model, two television stations compete for viewers (who are also voters); one station cares both about the size of its audience and about the incum- bent’s reelection prospects (this is the pro-incumbent station), while the other cares only about its audience (the neutral station). These objectives motivate the degree of bias that each station chooses for its reporting on incumbent corruption; this choice also depends on the proportion of have a television at home in the first place. 2The other remaining anti-government broadcast station was Globovision,´ but it was available only in Caracas and Valencia. 3 voters who have cable TV, who have broadcast TV only, and who don’t have televisions at all. Voters value stations both for entertainment and for information. The incumbent chooses whether to revoke the broadcasting license of the neutral outlet in light of the three effects previewed above: 1. News consumption effect: Forcing viewers without cable to consume news from the pro- incumbent outlet changes their beliefs about the incumbent’s corruption (positive updating); 2. Sanctioning effect: Depriving viewers without cable of the entertainment and news content from the neutral outlet changes their beliefs about whether the incumbent will pursue desir- able policies (negative updating); 3. Endogenous content effect: Weaker competition from the revoked station allows the pro- incumbent outlet to further bias its reporting in favor of the incumbent. The model establishes how revoking the neutral station’s broadcasting license, relative to main- taining public broadcast competition, exerts different effects on three types of voter. In particular, we derive expressions for two difference-in-differences in incumbent support. The first compares voters who have televisions but no cable and thus lose access to the station with voters who have cable and thus maintain access; the second compares voters who lose access to the station (because they have televisions but no cable) with voters who have no televisions at all and thus experience no change. When the sanctioning effect dominates, both difference-in-differences blue are negative; otherwise, the overall effects are positive. The model clarifies the conditions under which the incumbent will revoke the broadcasting license of the neutral outlet. While a small sanctioning effect is generally sufficient, we also show that large endogenous content effects—that is, self-censorship on the part of the surviving station—can lead a rational incumbent to revoke even when the sanctioning effect dominates the news consumption effect. Taking this model to the data, we find that the sanctioning effect indeed dominated the news consumption and endogenous content effects among voters with access to televisions without ca- 4 ble in the case of RCTV in Venezuela. Using an original panel of precinct-level electoral returns together with census-tract-level data on TV and cable penetration, we compare trends in support for Chavez´ across (a) neighborhoods where most households lost access to RCTV and (b) neigh- borhoods where few households lost access to RCTV.3 While trends prior to 2007 (when RCTV went off the air) were similar, trends after 2007 diverged: Chavez’s´ vote share declined more in neighborhoods that lost access to RCTV than neighborhoods that did not. Because available census-tract maps only cover part of the country, we repeat the analysis using a national panel at the parish level (a higher level of geographic aggregation), yielding similar results: whatever Chavez´ gained in 2007 by muffling anti-government RCTV news, he appears to have lost more in voters’ punishment. The magnitude of these differential effects exceeds the margin of Chavez’s´ defeat in the constitutional referendum in December of 2007—the only major electoral loss of Chavez’s´ career. However, we do not interpret these results as evidence that Chavez´ made a mistake, or even as evidence that the RCTV decision cost him the 2007 referendum. Rather, we note that events leading up to the expiration of RCTV’s broadcasting license exerted powerful
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