Opposition Media and Political Accountability: Evidence from Venezuela

OPPOSITIONMEDIAANDPOLITICALACCOUNTABILITY: EVIDENCEFROM VENEZUELA∗

DOROTHY KRONICK† JOHN MARSHALL‡

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 programming 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 popular 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 differentially 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. †Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania. Email: [email protected]. ‡Department 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 electoral 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 coverage, 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 voters 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 emphasized 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 incumbent’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 maintaining 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) neighborhoods 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 effects over other television stations (e.g. Romero 7/5/2007). As in our model, the other stations’ editorial lines shifted in favor of Chavez.´ Venevision,´ for example, cancelled several of its most anti-government programs (Human Rights Watch 2008, p. 112). As we explain below, these shifts likely contributed to Chavez’s´ resounding electoral triumph in 2006, when he won election with nearly 63% of the vote. Even if not renewing RCTV’s license cost him votes in the 2007 referendum, it was key to the construction of “communicational hegemony” (Corrales 2015, p. 40) and his regime’s long-term survival. As one journalist observed, “Instead of a police state, Chavez´ built a propaganda state” (Toro, 3/5/2013). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to study the consequences of muffling 3The precise definition of these treatment and control groups differs across specifications, but the results are qualitatively similar.

5 a major television station in a competitive authoritarian regime. While Adena et al.(2015) and Enikolopov, Petrova and Zhuravskaya(2011) analyze (respectively) the electoral effects of Nazi and Russian governments taking over popular anti-government media outlets, we instead focus on the disappearance of RCTV from the majority of Venezuelans’ television sets. This appar- ently subtle distinction may account for the contrasting electoral consequences: while takeovers boosted Nazi and Russian government vote shares, the muffling of RCTV cost Chavez´ votes among those that loss access to RCTV. This finding chimes with recent studies emphasizing how voters re-optimize their media consumption in response to propaganda, thus limiting its effective- ness(Gehlbach and Sonin 2014; Hobbs and Roberts forthcoming; Knight and Tribin 2018, 2019). However, our results are driven by a different mechanism: rather than voters switching away from propaganda toward more critical content (Knight and Tribin 2018), we find that voters directly sanction Chavez´ for his decision not to renew RCTV’s broadcast license. For that reason, our findings contribute to a broader literature on credit claiming and electoral response to poor performance. While much of this literature focuses on the introduction of popular policies (e.g. De La O 2015; de Janvry, Gonzalez-Navarro and Sadoulet 2014; Labonne 2013; Larreguy, Marshall and Trucco 2019; Manacorda, Miguel and Vigorito 2011), we show that voters also punish incumbents for policies that remove valued goods—whether because voters care directly about these goods, or because their removal provides a negative signal about the incumbent. By studying an unusual case in which changes in news consumption would generate electoral consequences counter to those expected from sanctioning—the former would have helped Chavez,´ while the latter would have hurt him—we show that censorship affects voting behavior through channels other than persuasion: the very decision to muffle a media outlet can change voters’ beliefs about an incumbent.

6 2 Context: The NBC of Venezuela goes off the air

For ﬁfty-three years prior to 2007, Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) was one of Venezuela’s most-watched television stations. Soap operas and other entertainment shows made up the bulk of the programming, but RCTV also aired news and commentary: the thrice-daily news program El Observador had high ratings, as did a weekly late-night political interview show called Primer Plano. Company president Marcel Granier served as the host of Primer Plano. Between 1999 and 2006, RCTV’s annualized audience share ranged from 22% to 34% (see Figure 2a).4 In December of 2006, then-president Hugo Chavez´ announced that he would not renew RCTV’s broadcasting license, which was set to expire on May 27, 2007. Chavez´ explained that the decision was motivated by RCTV’s support for a coup that had brieﬂy removed him from power in 2002. “They should pack their bags, because there will be no more broadcasting license for that coup-mongering TV station,” he said (Chavez´ 12/28/2006). Chavez’s´ accusation had merit. RCTV anchors had indeed cheered the short-lived coup against Chavez´ on April 11 and 12, 2002; on April 13, when the coup unraveled and Chavez´ was restored to power, the station aired cartoons and Pretty Woman instead of covering the massive pro-Chavez´ street demonstrations (Kronick 2007). These facts lent credibility to Chavez’s´ communication strategy: in 2007, the government promoted the non-renewal decision with posters reading, “Not renewing a lie gives license to the truth” (Figure1). But the government’s selective enforcement of the laws that RCTV broke revealed a political motivation. While Chavez´ denied the renewal of RCTV’s broadcasting license, he simultaneously permitted the renewal of the broadcasting license of Venevision—a´ major station with similarly hostile coverage during the 2002 coup. International organizations and human rights groups con- cluded that the difference lay in the stations’ post-coup decisions: Venevision´ and a third station, 4We are in the process of acquiring Nielsen data that will allow a more precise analysis of daily trends in consumption over this period.

7 Televen,´ had moderated their editorial lines in response to government pressure; RCTV had not. Billionaire media mogul and Venevision´ chief Gustavo Cisneros said as much in an interview with the New York Times (Romero, 7/5/2007). He explained (and the Times veriﬁed) that a 2004 meeting with Chavez—brokered´ by Cisneros’s friend Jimmy Carter—had convinced Cisneros to change course, fearing for Venevision’s´ survival. While prominent members of the opposition criticized Cisneros, he de- fended his decision by pointing out that “If you go off the air democracy loses ... We decided that we needed to pull through.” By 2005, Venevision´ had canceled some of its most adversarial programming Figure 1: (Human Rights Watch 2008, p. 112). Government poster advertising the non-renewal decision: “Giving license RCTV appealed the government’s decision not to the truth ... is not renewing a lie” to renew its broadcasting license, but the Supreme Court—which the Chavez´ administration had expanded from twenty to thirty-two justices—ruled in favor of the government. On May 27, 2007, the last day of its license, RCTV aired a farewell broadcast featuring tearful live commentary from anchors and actors. The ﬁnal minutes were de- voted to a montage of RCTV staff singing the national anthem; many of them wore shirts that read Freedom of Expression SOS. This became a major television event and helped spark a student-led protest movement that drew international media attention. RCTV soon returned as a cable and satellite channel, and the cable-and-satellite share of Venezuela’s television audience jumped (Figure 2b). But because only 25% of households had a cable or satellite subscription in 2007, millions of Venezuelans were forced to switch to other

8 (a) RCTV share of TV audience (b) Cable share of TV audience RCTV share Monthly share 90 90 RCTV (broadcast) Private channels (broadcast) 80 Televén + Venevisión 80 Cable & satellite Cable & satellite 70 70 State TV

60 60

50 50

40 40

Audience Share Audience 30 Share Audience 30

20 20

10 10

0 0 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2003m1 2004m1 2005m1 2006m1 2007m1 2008m1 2009m1 2010m1

Figure 2: Change in RCTV viewership

broadcast channels or reduce their viewing hours.5 Indeed, in the months after RCTV went off the air, the audience share of Venevision´ and Televen—both´ of which had moderated their editorial lines—increased by twelve percentage points. As a result, households without cable or satellite had little access to opposition television news after RCTV went off the air on May 27, 2007.6 Chavez´ used the fate of RCTV to threaten other television stations. At a rally on the Saturday after RCTV went off the air, Chavez´ said, “This time we were patient, and we tolerated the station for a while, waiting until the license expired. But no one should think it will always be like that. A license can end even ahead of the established time. A license can end, according to the law, for violations to the Constitution, for media terrorism ... If the Venezuelan bourgeoisie keeps broadcasting against the Bolivarian people, it will keep losing its outlets, one by one” (Kronick, 2007). In 2010, the Venezuelan communications commission (CONATEL) deemed RCTV ineligible even for cable transmission, on the grounds that it had violated Venezuela’s Law of Social Respon- sibility in Radio and Television. Again, RCTV appealed; again, the Supreme Court ruled in favor 5We are acquiring Nielsen data that will allow us to observe these changes with more precision. 6One opposition broadcast station, Globovision,´ remained, but it was a bit player, available only in two cities (Caracas and Valencia) and earning just 3.6% market share in 2006 (compared to 28% for RCTV, 27% for Venevision,´ and 12% for Televen).´ We discuss Globovision´ in more detail below.

9 Context: Venezuelan politics Figure 3: Timeline of Events

Dec. 2, 2007 Constitutional referendum (rejected) April 11, 2002 Feb. 2, 1999 May 27, 2007 Failed coup Cháveztakes office RCTV broadcasting license expires against Chávez

August 15, 2004 Feb. 15, 2009 Chávezwins recall vote Constitutional referendum negotiates with media (passed) → Venevisiónand Televénmoderate editorial lines; RCTV does not of the government, and cable providers stopped offering RCTV. Figure3 summarizes these events. We discuss the relevant elections in Section4 below.

3 Theory

We develop a simple model to characterize the conditions under which an incumbent would revoke a television station’s broadcast license.7 The incumbent faces a tradeoff. On one hand, revoking the license reduces the probability that voters will learn about the incumbent’s corruption and alters reporting incentives for the remaining comparatively pro-incumbent station; these consequences work in the incumbent’s favor. On the other hand, revoking the license deprives (some) voters of popular programming and thereby makes them more pessimistic about future policy outcomes, potentially leading them to sanction the incumbent at the polls. The following sections describe the equilibrium behavior of the incumbent, voters, and two media outlets, ultimately characterizing the factors that push a forward-looking incumbent to revoke the neutral outlet’s broadcasting license. 7While Chavez´ technically decided not to renew RCTV’s license, for brevity we use the term revoke in discussing the model.

10 3.1 Setup

We consider a two-period game. An incumbent holds office in the first period and seeks re-election for the second period. Voters vote for the incumbent or a challenger, seeking the better candidate along two dimensions: levels of corruption and policy alignment with a group’s material interests. Corruption is broadly construed; it could instead be interpreted as competence or any other valence characteristic that could be revealed through news reporting. While both the incumbent and each of two media outlets directly observe the incumbent’s corruption and policy alignment, voters are poorly informed about both dimensions of the incumbent’s type. Moreover, voters are unaware that media outlets know the incumbent’s type. Politicians. Office-seeking politicians are characterized by two independently-determined at- tributes. First, with probability κC ∈ (0,1), a politician is corrupt, C ∈ {0,1}, at a cost afflicting all voters. Second, with probability κB ∈ [0,1], a politician will implement policies that are biased against a particular group of voters. Once in office, each incumbent type receives positive rents (which are normalized to 1). To potentially increase their chance of retaining office, an incumbent can revoke the public broadcast license of television stations m ∈ {F,A} (see below). License revocation is denoted by Rm ∈ {0,1}. We assume that the large costs of revoking both public outlets is prohibitive, so the incumbent would never revoke the license of the more favorable outlet F. To broadly capture our application to Chavez´ in Venezuela, we assume that the incumbent in office in period one is both corrupt (i.e. C = 1) and biased against consumers of outlet A (i.e. B = 1).8 Television stations. We consider a simple media environment with (up to) two public broadcast television outlets, m ∈ {F,A}. Both outlets maximize their (non-cable and cable) audience share, but are differentiated by the fact that F also attaches weight ω > 0 to the (endogenously determined) probability P that the incumbent is re-elected. This reduced form supply-side bias could, for example, reflect ideology (e.g. Gentzkow, Glaeser and Goldin 2006; Puglisi and Snyder 8If the incumbent were not corrupt, the media outlets would face identical incentives. However, a similar logic would apply in this case if one outlet sought to reduce the incumbent’s probability of winning.

11 2008) or a differential incidence of political sanctions that could be imposed by the incumbent.

Television stations can scramble their reporting by choosing bias bm ∈ [0,1], such that consumer’s

posterior belief that the incumbent is corrupt is 1−bm when the incumbent is corrupt and bm when the incumbent is not corrupt. We thus assume that media outlets are persuasive, given that consumers are not aware that television stations know that the incumbent is corrupt. If outlet m’s license is revoked, only consumers with a cable subscription can continue watching outlet m. Voters. There is a continuum of voters with unit mass, so no individual voter can affect the election outcome. There are three types of voter: share τ ∈ [0,1] do not possess a television, and thus cannot consume any televised content; δ ∈ [0,1−τ] have a cable subscription that allows them to consume any television station, regardless of whether its license is revoked; and share 1 − τ − δ have television sets, but can only access outlets with a public broadcast license. Each voter i with a television chooses which station to consume, ci ∈ {F,A}; for simplicity, voters can only consume content from one television station. Voters receive two types of benefits from consuming a given television outlet: (i) entertainment consumption benefits αim > 0 from the content provided by outlet m, e.g. the quality of non-political production (e.g. Hamilton 2004; Mullainathan and Shleifer 2005); and (ii) informational benefits from political content that help voters to take an action ai ∈ {0,1} intended to match the state C (e.g. Duggan and Martinelli 2011; Gentzkow and Shapiro 2006; Stromberg¨ 2004), which could capture private actions that depend on C or the expressive utility of being able to identify and potentially remove corrupt incumbents. Voter i’s consumption utility is given by:

∑ 1[ci = m] αim + γ1[ai = C] , (1) m∈{F,A} where i’s value of consuming entertainment content is uniformly distributed according to αiF − 1 1 αiA ∼ U(η − 2ψ ,η + 2ψ ) (independently of a voter’s access to television), and γ > 0 captures the

beneﬁt from matching action ai to state C.

12 Vote choices reﬂect partisan biases and updated beliefs about both B and C. Following Lind- beck and Weibull’s(1987) canonical probabilistic voting model, voter i’s partisan bias toward the

1 1 incumbent is I +εi, where the common shock is uniformly distributed according to I ∼U(− 2φ , 2φ ) 1 1 and the individual-speciﬁc shock is uniformly distributed according to εi ∼ U(− 2 , 2 ). Whereas voters update about C purely from their television station’s persuasive informational content (see above), they update about B when they lose access to their preferred television station in terms

of entertainment content (i.e. i prefers A when αiA − αiF > 0), but otherwise retain their prior beliefs.9 The relative importance of corruption and bias in voting decisions is captured by the weights

βB > 0 and βC > 0. Voter i votes expressively to maximize their probability of selecting a better incumbent, relatively to a randomly-drawn challenger; for example, this could reﬂect future policy beneﬁts from better incumbents. This entails voting for the incumbent when:

I + εi − βBκˆB(RA) − βCκˆC(cim) ≥ −βBκB − βCκC, (2)

where κˆB(RA) and κˆC(cim) denote i’s posterior beliefs. Timing. The game’s timing can be summarized as follows:

1. At the beginning of the ﬁrst period, the incumbent selects RA ∈ {0,1}.

2. Each television station m ∈ {F,A} publicly announces its bias bm ∈ [0,1].

3. Wherever possible, each voter chooses which television station to consume, ci ∈ {F,A}.

4. The election parameters I + εi are realized, and voters choose whether to re-elect the incumbent.

5. Payoffs are realized at the end of the second period.

9 We implicitly assume that Pr[RA = 0|B = 1] = 1, i.e. that voters do not anticipate that RA is a choice for the incumbent. Accordingly, voters do not update positively when the incumbent does not shut down a media outlet.

13 The actions taken at each stage are public information for all actors. The following subsections

examine the course of play conditional on the incumbent’s choice RA, before considering the conditions under which the incumbent revokes A’s public broadcast license in the full subgame perfect equilibrium.

3.2 The subgame when A’s public broadcast license is not revoked

When A’s license is not revoked, voters with non-cable and cable television sets can freely choose to consume either station A or station F. Although we can solve this subgame backwards by starting with vote choices, we instead start with voters’ television consumption decision because— due to the large electorate—it is orthogonal to vote choice. In particular, each voter i among the

share 1 − τ of voters that owns a (non-cable or cable) television chooses to consume station F when:

αiF + γ[1 − bF ] > αiA + γ(1 − bA). (3)

Given the distribution of voters’ entertainment preferences, the mass of consumers of F and A is then given by:

aF (bF ,bA|RA = 0) := (1 − τ)[µ + ψγ(bF − bA)] ∈ [0,1], (4)

aA(bF ,bA|RA = 0) := (1 − τ)[1 − µ + ψγ(bA − bF )] ∈ [0,1] (5)

1 where µ := 2 + ψη captures the share of consumers that prefer F’s entertainment content to A’s.

Unsurprisingly, outlet A’s audience share is increasing in its relative propensity, bF −bA, to clearly report the incumbent’s corruption type. Given television consumption choices,equation (2) deﬁnes when voter i consuming outlet m votes for the incumbent. Since the incumbent and television stations know that C = 1 will be fully

14 or partially revealed, the expected vote choice of consumer i of outlet m from the incumbent and

television stations’ perspective is given by: I +εi −βBκB −βC(1−bm) ≥ −βBκB −βCκC. Because

they are not aware of this, voters without televisions vote for the incumbent when I + εi − βBκˆB −

βCκˆC ≥ −βBκB −βCκC. Rearranging and integrating over i-level partisan shocks, the expected vote share (from the incumbent or media outlet perspective) among consumers of television station m is thus:

1 V (b |c = m,R = 0) = + I − β (1 − b − κ ). (6) m i A 2 C m C

Regardless of RA, the incumbent’s vote share among voters without televisions is V (bm|ci = /0) = 1 2 +I. Summing over voter type shares and media outlet audiences yields the incumbent’s expected vote share:

1 V (b ,b |R = 0) := + I − β [a (b ,b |R = 0)∆ + a (b ,b |R = 0)∆ ], (7) F A A 2 C A F A A A F F A A F

where ∆m := (1−bm −κC) is the expected change in the posterior belief about C among consumers

of m, which is intuitively increasing in bm because the incumbent is actually corrupt. Integrating over the common shock I then yields the incumbent’s expected probability of being re-elected:

1 P(b ,b |R = 0) = − φβ [a (b ,b |R = 0)∆ + a (b ,b |R = 0)∆ ]. (8) F A A 2 C A F A A A F F A A F

Having established m’s audience share and the incumbent’s win probability, we now determine the biases chosen by each television station.Each media outlet m simultaneously solves:

max am(bF ,bA|RA = 0) + ω1[m = F]P(bF ,bA|RA = 0). (9) rm

The reaction functions associated with choosing bm, for F and A respectively, are then deﬁned by

15 the following ﬁrst-order conditions:

    a (b ,b |R = 0)  a (b ,b |R = 0) ∂ F F A A ∂ ∆F ∂ F F A A  −ωφβC  aF (rF ,rA|RA = 0)+ (∆F − ∆A)  ≤ 0,(10) ∂bF  ∂bF ∂bF  | {z } | {z } | {z } effect of raising bF F’s biased content effect news consumption effect on F’s audience share on incumbent reelection from increasing F’s bias ∂a (b ,b |R = 0) A F A A ≤ 0. (11) ∂bF | {z } effect of raising bA on A’s audience share

where F trades off its reduction in audience share from increasing its bias ( ∂aF (bF ,bA|RA=0) = −(1− ∂bF τ)ψγ < 0) against the net effect of conflicting electoral incentives: (i) a persuasion effect of biased content, which reflects the increase in votes for the incumbent, holding F’s audience share fixed

(since ∂ ∆F < 0); and (ii) a news consumption effect, which reﬂects the decrease in F’s audience ∂bF share due to an increase an increase in it’s bias, holding the content of each outlet ﬁxed (since

∂aF (bF ,bA|RA=0) ∗ < 0 and ∆F − ∆A < 0). Clearly, b = 0 holds, because there is no incentive for ∂bF A the audience-maximizing outlet A to bias its reporting. We can then solve simultaneously for F’s

∗ 10 (interior) optimal level of bias, bF , when A’s license is not revoked:

∗ µ 1 bF = − . (12) 2ψγ 2ωφβC

Whereas neutral television station A does not bias its signal, station F’s bias is increasing in the

electoral sensitivity of voters to corruption (φβC), the extent to which F values the election result (ω), and the F’s baseline audience level (µ), while it is decreasing in the extent to which voters value information (ψγ). 10It is straightforward to show that the second order conditions hold.

16 3.3 The subgame when A’s public broadcast license is revoked

We next turn to the case, RA = 1, when the incumbent revokes A’s public broadcast license. In this case, only cable subscribers can watch television station A, while non-cable subscribers that would like to consume A infer that the incumbent is not aligned with their interests. Following an analogous approach as before, the total audience of each outlet is now given by:

aF (bF ,bA|RA = 1) := (1 − τ − δ ) + δ [µ + ψγ(bF − bA)] ∈ [0,1], (13)

aA(bF ,bA|RA = 1) := δ [1 − µ + ψγ(bA − bF )] ∈ [0,1], (14)

where F now captures the entire non-cable television audience. F now faces signiﬁcantly less

competition from A, especially when few voters have access to cable television (i.e. δ is small). The incumbent party’s vote share and probability of winning is now given by:

1 V (b ,b |R = 1) := + I − β [a (b ,b |R = 1)∆ + a (b ,b |R = 1)∆ ] F A A 2 C A F A A A F F A A F

−(1 − τ − δ )(1 − µ)βB∆B, (15) 1 P(b ,b |R = 1) := − φβ [a (b ,b |R = 1)∆ + a (b ,b |R = 1)∆ ] F A A 2 C A F A A A F F A A F

−φ(1 − τ − δ )(1 − µ)βB∆B, (16)

where ∆B := 1 − κB is the extent of negative updating about the incumbent’s alignment with the mass of non-cable voters with televisions that prefer A’s entertainment content. The ﬁnal term in each expression thus captures the sanctioning effect induced by revoking A’s public broadcast license.

∗∗ While television station A still has no incentive to bias its content (so bA = 0), the lack of media market competition changes the incentives facing F. Indeed, the solution to the maximization

17 problem akin to equation (9) is:

∗∗ 1 − δ − τ + δ µ 1 bF = − , (17) 2δψγ 2ωφβC where, because F can now retain its non-cable audience with its bias only being constrained to

∗∗ ∗ the extent that it values the cable market, it is clear that bF > bF . We thus expect the bias of the remaining public broadcast television stations to increase after another station’s license is revoked.

3.4 When will the incumbent revoke outlet A’s license?

The preceding subsections illuminate how media outlets and voters will behave when A’s license is and is not revoked. Comparing the outcomes of the two subgames, the ofﬁce-seeking incumbent then maximizes their re-election probability. This implies that the incumbent revokes A’s license

∗∗ ∗∗ ∗ ∗ when P(bF ,bA |RA = 1) ≥ P(bF ,bA|RA = 0). This implies the following condition:

∗ ∗ ∗∗ ∗ (1 − τ − δ )βC(1 − snF )bF + (1 − τ − δ )βC(bF − bF ) | {z } | {z } non-cable news consumption effect non-cable endogenous content effect ∗∗ ∗ ∗ ∗∗ ∗∗ ∗ +δβC(scF − scF )bF +δβCscF (bF − bF ) > (1 − τ − δ )(1 − µ)βB∆B, (18) | {z } | {z } | {z } cable news cable news endogenous sanctioning effect consumption effect content effect

where snm and scm respectively denote the share of non-cable and cable television owners that consume media outlet m in each subgame. With respect to non-cable viewers, the content and news consumption effects associated with revoking A’s license compound each other and provide a motivation for revocation, especially when there is a large number of voters with non-cable televisions that prefer outlet A. However, these gains are tempered by the sanctioning effect among the same set of voters. For voters with cable televisions, the net effect of the conﬂicting content and news consumption effects is ambiguous, as increasing bias reduces the cable audience share. Ultimately, where δ is relatively small, the incumbent will revoke A’s license when the news consumption and

18 endogenous content beneﬁts exceed the sanctioning effect among non-cable consumers. The preceding analysis also illuminates the factors that might explain variation over time in the incentives to revoke a media outlet’s public broadcast license. Based on equation(18), the most

obvious push factors are a rise in βC (concern about corruption) relative to βB (concern about bias) or µ (the baseline share of F viewers), or a decline in γ (the value of information about corruption),

κC (voters’ prior that the incumbent is corrupt), or δ (the share of voters with cable). While we cannot deﬁnitively determine which factors were most relevant to our case, there is good reason to imagine that βC was increasing relative to βB around the time of Chavez’s´ decision. First, Chavez´ did not actively revoke RCTV’s broadcast license; rather, his government declined to renew it when it expired. This distinction formed the basis for one of the government’s tag lines: “Not renewing a lie gives license to the truth” (emphasis added; see Figure1). Ch avez´ might reasonably have imagined that the negative updating induced by actively revoking the license would exceed any negative updating induced by simply letting it expire; we might therefore interpret the expiration date as a drop in βB. At the same time, with oil prices rising and Chavez´ newly empowered by his 63–37 victory over the challenger in the 2006 presidential election, he might reasonably have thought that voters would be newly concerned about misuse of state funds, among other abuses—and that RCTV would be poised to strike. We might interpret these changes as a rise in βC.

3.5 Empirical implications

Our model helps to motivate and interpret our empirical analyses. This subsection generates testable predictions with regard to identifying the effects of revoking a relatively unbiased television station’s public broadcast license. We ﬁrst consider voting behavior by comparing incumbent vote shares across voter subpop- ulations. To motivate the difference-in-differences design below, we can identify the effects of combinations of the core mechanisms induced by revoking A’s license by comparing the vote

19 choices of those with televisions without cable to either voters without televisions or voters with cable television. The former estimand comparing voters with access to televisions but differing in their access to cable is captured by the following comparison:

1 0 1 0 ∗∗ ∗ ∗∗ ∗∗ ∗ [Vn −Vn ] − [Vc −Vc ]= βC(1 − scF )bF +βC(1 − scF )(bF − bF )−(1 − µ)βB∆B, (19) | {z } | {z } | {z } news consumption endogenous differential effect content effect sanctioning effect

RA RA where Vn and Vc denote the incumbent’s vote share among voters with televisions without and with cable, respectively, and s continues to denote the audience share within a subpopulation. The overall effect is ambiguous, depending on the relative magnitude of the negative sanctioning effect relative to the positive terms capturing the news consumption and content effects. Interestingly, a dominant sanctioning effect does not necessarily imply that it is irrational for the incumbent to

revoke A’s license. Indeed, even when δ = 0, inspection of equations (18) and (19) indicates that the sanctioning effect can dominate while maintaining an incentive to revoke A’s license if the

∗∗ ∗∗ ∗ ∗ endogenous content effect is sufﬁciently favorable; this occurs when scF bF > snF bF . We can similarly compare voters without cable to voters without televisions:

1 0 1 0 ∗ ∗ ∗∗ ∗ [Vn −Vn ] − [V/0 −V/0 ] = βC(1 − snF )bF +βC(bF − bF )−(1 − µ)βB∆B . (20) | {z } | {z } | {z } news consumption endogenous differential effect content effect sanctioning effect

While the sanctioning effect remains the same, the combined news consumption and content effect is somewhat different. Speciﬁcally, the combined effect is larger than in equation (19) when

∗ ∗ ∗∗ ∗∗ snF bF < scF bF , which will hold when δ is small and the pro-incumbent television station is willing to engage in substantial bias because the cable market is relatively unimportant. Furthermore, and in contrast with the comparison with cable viewers, the same condition indicates that if estimand (20) is negative then the incumbent would only revoke A’s license when the net effect on the vote share of cable voters is sufﬁciently positive.

20 The preceding estimands capture the ambiguous net impact of the sanctioning and news consumption and endogenous content effects on vote choices. However, to establish the presence of an endogenous content effect driven by competition between television stations beyond simply a news consumption effect, we can further examine television station content. As noted above, the model clearly predicts that bias is greater after A’s license is revoked:

1 − δ − τ b∗∗ − b∗ = > 0. (21) F F 2δψγ

The estimation of this endogenous content is discussed empirically below.

4 Differential electoral effects of losing access to RCTV

We ﬁrst estimate the differential electoral effects of Chavez’s´ decision to revoke RCTV’s license across voters with and without access to cable—that is to say estimand (19). To capture whether the sanctioning effect dominates the news consumption and endogenous content effects induced by forcing RCTV onto cable television only, we leverage the fact that many voters with televisions but without access to cable effectively lost access to RCTV after May 2007. Speciﬁcally, we employ a difference-in-differences design that compares changes in Chavez’s´ (or Maduro’s) vote share before and after RCTV’s license was revoked across areas the experienced different levels of lost access to RCTV.

4.1 Data and main variables

We use electoral returns and census microdata to construct our main dependent and independent variables.

21 4.1.1 Electoral support for Chavez´

Venezuela’s electoral council publishes voting-machine-level electoral results on its website,11 which other researchers have scraped and made publicly available.12 We aggregate the voting- machine tallies up to the polling center level for the four presidential elections and three national referenda between 2000 and 2013. Presidential elections were held in 2000, 2006, 2012, and 2013; a presidential recall referendum was held in 2004, and national referenda on proposed constitutional amendments were held in 2007 and 2009. Given the proliferation of polling centers in 2005, we construct a balanced panel by aggregating polling center × year observations up to the pre-2005 polling center level.13 Figure4 plots the pro-Ch avez´ vote share in the seven elections in our sample. We exclude the legislative elections (2000, 2005, 2010) and regional elections (2000, 2004, 2008, 2013) because it is difficult to identify the “pro-Chavez’s´ vote share” in these elections; we could study the vote share of his party, but party cohesion—and even the party name—changed so dramatically over this period that the comparison would not be meaningful. In contrast, Chavez´ campaigned vigor- ously in favor of the proposed constitutional amendments in 2007 and 2009, so much so that many observers thus interpreted them as referenda on Chavez´ himself. Moreover, the proposed amendments would have directly empowered Chavez:´ both votes considered the abolition of presidential term limits, and the first included, among other changes, the curtailment of central bank autonomy. In each election, our outcome of interest is the pro-Chavez´ vote share. In presidential elections, this is simply Chavez’s´ vote share—or, in the 2013 election, the share of Chavez’s´ handpicked successor Nicolas´ Maduro. (The 2013 presidential election was held less than six weeks after 11http://www.cne.gov.ve/. 12http://esdata.info/. 13Specifically, for each new polling place—that is, for each polling place that did not exist in 2004—we locate the (geographically) closest old polling place (that is, polling place that existed in the 2004 election); we then aggregated back up to these pre-2005 units. (Polling places are geocoded.) Encouragingly, the correlation in the aggregated dataset between Chavez’s´ vote share in the 2004 and 2006 elections is ρ = 0.98. We drop the few polling centers for which data was not available for each election.

22 Figure 4: Elections in Our Sample Pro-Chávez vote share 65 Chavez´ wins Maduro wins reelection Chavez’s´ Chavez´ wins reelection constitutional referendum fails 60 Chavez´ wins Chavez’s´ constitutional recall referendum referendum passes 55 Chavez´ wins Chavez vote share Chavez reelection

50 7/30/2000 8/15/2004 12/3/'0612/2/'07 2/15/2009 10/7/'12

Chavez’s´ death.) For the 2004 recall referendum, we code the pro-Chavez´ vote as the vote against recalling him. For the referenda in 2007 and 2009, we code the pro-Chavez´ vote as the yes vote in favor of each initiative. While our primary analyses are conducted at the polling center level in the six large and urban states for which we were able to obtain census tract shapeﬁles (which allow us to merge electoral and census data), we also analyze a parish-level panel that includes the whole country.

4.1.2 Measuring the proportion of households that lose access to RCTV

Based on the 2001 Venezuelan census microdata, we are able to identify households that lost access to RCTV as those with televisions but without cable. We match this to our electoral data by aggregating households up to the census tract and parish levels; census tracts contain 200 households on average, while parishes contain 12,000 households. These measures deﬁne the local intensity of lost access to RCTV as the share of households that lost RCTV. Figure 5a plots the distribution of the estimated proportion of households that lost access to RCTV across the polling centers in the Federal District of Caracas and states of Aragua, Carabobo, Lara, Miranda, and Vargas. We operationalize the loss of access to RCTV in 2007 in several ways. We ﬁrst impose a linear

23 Figure 5: Density and Evolution of Treatment: Households with TV, No Cable (a) Density (b) % Households with Satellite or Cable satelite + cable 2.5 70

2 60

50 1.5

Density 40 1

30 .5 20 % households with satelite or cable satelite with % households 0 0 .2 .4 .6 .8 1 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 % households who lost RCTV

Notes: Figure (a) plots the distribution (across electoral precincts) of the proportion of households who had television but no cable in 2007. Figure (b) plots how the proportion of households with satellite or cable (i.e. not in our treatment group) changes over time, using data from CONATEL.

functional form on our analysis by examining the share of households that lost access to RCTV. However, linearity may not represent a good approximation for the relationship between lost access to RCTV and voting behavior if vote choices also reﬂect factors outside our model, such as information—either about RCTV’s license being revoked or the content of RCTV programming— that diffuses between neighbors (e.g. Bhandari, Larreguy and Marshall 2019; Fafchamps, Vaz and Vicente Forthcoming) or coordination that relies on high levels of treatment saturation (Adida et al. 2017; Enr´ıquez et al. 2019) or common knowledge (George, Gupta and Neggers 2018). To more ﬂexibly estimate the effects of losing access to RCTV, we consider two additional operationaliza- tions: an indicator for polling centers/parishes where more than 50% of households lost access to RCTV—79% of households at the average polling center coded 1 lost access to RCTV, in comparison with 35% at polling centers coded 0; or a set of indicators corresponding to 0–25%, 25–50%, 50–75%, and 75–100% of households within a polling center/parish losing access to RCTV. In each case, the reference category is the group that experienced the smallest loss of RCTV in 2007. Linking these measures of lost access to RCTV with our electoral data requires that we spatially

24 merge polling center coordinates with census tract polygons. However, the lowest level of aggregation where electoral and census boundaries coincide is at the level of the country’s c.1,100 parishes. Although we are therefore able to exactly merge parishes with the share of Census respondents that lost access to RCTV at this level for the entire country, a more fine-grained measure of intensity is possible in six largely urban states—the Federal District of Caracas, Miranda, Vargas, Carabobo, Aragua, and Lara—for which we have been able to obtain census tract-level shapefiles. In these states, which include approximately 40% of the population, we link each polling center to the share of households that lost access to RCTV in the census tract in which it is located.14 We focus primarily on this polling center level data for our main analysis due to the substantial increase in measurement precision—which, in turn, generates more variation in lost access to RCTV—and the more fine-grained fixed effects that this approach permits. Nationwide parish-level results are presented as an external validity check. Our approach to measuring the loss of RCTV has two main limitations. First, the census records whether a household has a television and whether it has cable, but not whether it has satellite television. Our measure of a household losing access to RCTV when it has television but not cable would thus over-count the number of households that lost access to RCTV to the extent that some households had access to satellite television without also having cable. However, although we have not yet obtained exact numbers, very few households are likely to have had satellite television during the period that we examine. Second, the Venezuelan census was conducted in 2001 and again in 2011, but RCTV ceased public broadcasting in 2007. Because the number of cable and satellite subscriptions grew over this decade, albeit particularly toward the decade’s end (see Figure 5b), the 2001 census over-counts and the 2011 census under-counts the number of households who lost access to RCTV. Our principal specification uses the 2001 measure that could not be a function 14Given the significant spatial correlation within the nearby urban areas for which census tract maps are available, the fact that polling centers will often include voters from neighboring tracts is unlikely to add substantial measurement error. This is supported by the similar estimates obtained when using polling center- and parish-level operationalization of our main independent variable.

25 of RCTV’s license revocation, although we also present results using linear interpolation to project the cable share in 2006 as a robustness check. The purchase of cable subscriptions after RCTV’s license was revoked is an endogenous response to the shock, and thus part of any treatment effect. While it should not be adjusted for as part of the design, it is important to understand the extent to which this is a mechanism driving any effects of losing public broadcast access to RCTV. At a minimum, Figure 5b suggests that there was no jump in cable and/or satellite subscriptions immediately after RCTV went off the air.

4.2 Identiﬁcation strategy

We use a difference-in-differences design to estimate the effect of losing access to RCTV in 2007 on electoral support for Chavez.´ The temporal difference compares pro-Chavez´ support before and after RCTV’s broadcast closure. The spatial difference compares polling centers (or parishes) that vary in the extent to which they could receive RCTV before the reform but not after (based on the time-invariant 2001 census measure of television without cable described above). As our formal model highlights, this design could leverage trends in Chavez´ support among voters that either already had cable or did not have a television in the ﬁrst place to approximate the counterfactual trend that voters who lost access to RCTV would have experienced had RCTV’s license not been revoked. For the polling center-level analysis in relatively wealthy urban areas where very few households do not possess a television, we remove the few polling centers where fewer than 95% of households owned a television in 2001. By leveraging only those with access to cable for our counterfactual, this version of the design captures estimand (19). For the smaller nationwide parish-level sample, we both pool types of counterfactual trend to estimate a weighted average of estimands (19) and (20) and drop parishes where more than 5% of households had cable to approximate estimand (20). The design’s internal validity rests on whether the parallel trends assumption—that areas losing access to RCTV would have followed similar trends to the observed counterfactual cases—holds.

26 (a) Unconditional (b) Conditional on parish × year ﬁxed effects Diff in diff Diff in diff .7 .7

.6 .6

.5 .5 Slope Slope

.4 .4

.3 .3 2000 2004 20062007 2009 20122013 2000 2004 20062007 2009 20122013

Figure 6: Polling-center level correlation between households with television but no cable and votes for Chavez´

We assess this by estimating regressions that allow the relationship between the share of households that lost RCTV in 2007 and the Chavez´ vote share to vary across elections.15 In the polling center sample, Figures 6a and 7a show that the relationship is similar in the three elections before RCTV’s broadcast license was revoked. Figures 6b and 7b further show that trends remain parallel in our preferred specification that further includes parish × year fixed effects to increase statistical power. The inclusion of these fixed effects ensures that we fully adjust for all determinants of Chavez´ support that differ across parishes at any given election, and thus also increases the design’s plausibility by weakening the parallel trends assumption to require only that polling centers within parishes would have followed similar trends in Chavez´ support in the absence of RCTV’s closure. Given the plausibility of the parallel trends assumption in this context, we proceed to estimate the differential effect of Chavez´ revoking RCTV’s license across voters with lower and greater 15Specifically, we estimate the following regression equation:

2013 0 Chavez´ it = ∑ βt Lost RCTVi × 1[t = t ] + γt + εit , t=2000 where γt are ﬁxed effects for each election t = 2000,...,2013, and Lost RCTVi is either the share of those that lost RCTV in 2007 or a dummy for polling centers where more than 50% of households lost RCTV.

27 (a) Unconditional (b) Conditional on parish × year ﬁxed effects Diff in diff Diff in diff .3 .25

.25 .2 Slope Slope

.2 .15

.15 .1

2000 2004 20062007 2009 20122013 2000 2004 20062007 2009 20122013

Figure 7: Correlation between polling center where more than 50% of households have a television but no cable and votes for Chavez´

access to cable using baseline OLS speciﬁcations of the following form:

Chavez´ ipt = αLost RCTVip + β Lost RCTVip × Post-RCTV closuret + γpt + εipt, (22)

where Chavez´ ipt is Chavez’s´ vote share in polling center i of parish p at election t, Lost RCTVip is a measure (or set of measures) of the share of the polling center that lost access to RCTV in 2007,

Post-RCTV closuret is a dummy for elections occurring after RCTV was shut down, and γpt are parish × year ﬁxed effects. Observations are weighted by the number of registered voters at each polling center, and s tandard errors are clustered by parish.

Ideally, we could interpret β as identifying the net effects of losing free access to RCTV on electoral support for Chavez´ among those that lost access. For example, in the case where

Lost RCTVip is an indicator for at least 50% of households in the polling center losing RCTV, our estimand is the effect of at least 50% of households losing RCTV relative to at most 50% of households losing RCTV. However, such an interpretation further requires that—in addition to invoking the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA) and the parallel trends assumption described above—we invoke the assumption that there is no “compound treatment.” The primary concern is

28 that other events which occurred after 2007 could also have differentially impacted polling centers with differing levels of access to RCTV. We address this concern by demonstrating that the results are robust to adjusting for the interaction between election year ﬁxed effects and covariates that could confound Lost RCTVip and thereby jeopardize the interpretation of β is being attributable to losing access to RCTV. Speciﬁcally, we use factor analysis to identify three latent (unrotated) dimensions that differentiate polling centers according to 19 census variables that could plausibly interact with shocks to drive voting behavior.16 The factor loadings in Appendix Table A2 suggest that the three factors broadly capturing poverty and class, household demographics, and commu-

3 nity characteristics. By adjusting for ∑ j=1 ηt f actor jip, we address the possibility that the effect of losing access to RCTV is confounded by other shocks occurring around the same time that affected voters with correlated characteristics.

4.3 Results

Suggesting that the sanctioning effect dominates the countervailing loss of more critical information about incumbent performance, the following results demonstrate that the areas where many voters lost access to RCTV became signiﬁcantly more likely to oppose Chavez´ (and then Maduro) and his constitutional reforms. We start by reporting polling center-level results, before generaliz- ing the ﬁndings within Venezuela by examining nationwide parish-level estimates.

4.3.1 Polling center results in six populous states

The election-by-election estimates in Figures 6b and 7b provide preliminary evidence suggesting that voters in the polling centers that suffered the greatest loss of free access to RCTV punished Chavez´ electorally more than voters at polling centers with greater access to cable. This suggests that, rather than shielding voters from news content from a popular but politically unfavorable 16The ﬁrst three factors were chosen on the basis that their eigenvalues all exceeded 1. We do not control for home internet access because this is likely to be part of the same communications package.

29 television station, voters that lost RCTV may have instead turned against Chavez´ at the ballot box. In short, the sanctioning effect appears to dominate any counterveiling effects arising from limited access to critical news reporting. However, by examining each election separately, the estimates remain relatively imprecise. Our main estimates in Table1 pool across the elections before and after RCTV’s public broadcast license was revoked to quantify and formally test whether the voters most affected by the license revocation indeed sanctioned Chavez.´ Panel A reports the results from all elections. Panel B excludes the 2012 and 2013 elections, in order to examine the extent to which the results were driven by immediate changes in vote choices (and remove the 2013 presidential election, where Maduro ran after Chavez’s´ death). Panel C excludes the Federal District of Caracas and the municipalities in which consumers could switch their news consumption to Globovision, the highly critical geographically-limited 24-hour news station that Knight and Tribin(2018) find to have reduced Chavez’s´ vote share after its audience increased in 2007. Within each panel, groups of three regression specifications refer to different approaches to operationalizing the intensity of lost access to RCTV. Confirming the graphical insights, the results suggest that revoking RCTV’s license caused a significant decline in support for Chavez.´ This is first apparent in column (1) of panel A, where we impose a linear relationship on the RCTV loss intensity. The point estimate implies that the Chavez´ vote share declined by around 4 percentage points at polling centers where all voters lost access to RCTV relative to polling centers where no person lost access to RCTV. The less para- metric estimates further suggest that sanctioning of Chavez´ was somewhat not linear in the share of voters that lost RCTV. Specifically, column (4) reports that Chavez´ support declined by 1.8 percentage points—around 3% of the mean Chavista´ vote share, but about enough to have swung the 2007 referendum outcome against Chavez—in´ polling centers where more than 50% of households lost access to RCTV, relative to polling stations where less than 50% of households lost access to RCTV. Column (7) more clearly suggests a nonlinear relationship, indicating that the net sanction-

30 Table 1: Effect of losing RCTV in 2007 on electoral support for Chavez´

Chavez´ vote share (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) Panel A: All elections Share with TV without cable (2001) × Post-RCTV closure -0.045** -0.040** -0.028** (0.018) (0.016) (0.014) Share with TV without cable (2001)>0.5 × Post-RCTV closure -0.018*** -0.019*** -0.014*** (0.006) (0.005) (0.004) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.007 -0.009* -0.008 (0.008) (0.005) (0.006) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.024*** -0.025*** -0.021*** (0.008) (0.007) (0.007) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure -0.031** -0.031*** -0.025*** (0.012) (0.010) (0.008)

Observations 8,589 8,589 8,589 8,589 8,589 8,589 8,589 8,589 8,589 Unique parishes 109 109 109 109 109 109 109 109 109 Outcome mean 0.49 0.49 0.49 0.49 0.49 0.49 0.49 0.49 0.49 Outcome standard deviation 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 Intensity mean 0.63 0.63 0.63 0.67 0.67 0.67 0.26 0.26 0.26 Second intensity mean 0.27 0.27 0.27 Third intensity mean 0.40 0.40 0.40 Panel B: 2000-2009 elections Share with TV without cable (2001) × Post-RCTV closure -0.055*** -0.052*** -0.037** (0.018) (0.017) (0.015) Share with TV without cable (2001)>0.5 × Post-RCTV closure -0.022*** -0.023*** -0.016*** (0.006) (0.006) (0.004) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.009 -0.011** -0.009* (0.006) (0.005) (0.005) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.026*** -0.028*** -0.023*** (0.007) (0.006) (0.006)

31 Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure -0.038*** -0.038*** -0.030*** (0.011) (0.011) (0.008)

Observations 6,135 6,135 6,135 6,135 6,135 6,135 6,135 6,135 6,135 Unique parishes 109 109 109 109 109 109 109 109 109 Outcome mean 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 Outcome standard deviation 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 Intensity mean 0.63 0.63 0.63 0.67 0.67 0.67 0.26 0.26 0.26 Second intensity mean 0.27 0.27 0.27 Third intensity mean 0.40 0.40 0.40 Panel C: Excluding municipalities with access to Globovision Share with TV without cable (2001) × Post-RCTV closure 0.011 0.003 0.018 (0.018) (0.013) (0.011) Share with TV without cable (2001)>0.5 × Post-RCTV closure -0.005 -0.011** -0.014*** (0.007) (0.004) (0.005) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.002 -0.007 -0.006 (0.013) (0.008) (0.008) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.014 -0.023*** -0.021** (0.013) (0.008) (0.008) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure 0.003 -0.006 -0.005 (0.015) (0.009) (0.009)

Observations 3,570 3,570 3,570 3,570 3,570 3,570 3,570 3,570 3,570 Unique parishes 72 72 72 72 72 72 72 72 72 Outcome mean 0.53 0.53 0.53 0.53 0.53 0.53 0.53 0.53 0.53 Outcome standard deviation 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.17 Intensity mean 0.59 0.59 0.59 0.63 0.63 0.63 0.28 0.28 0.28 Second intensity mean 0.34 0.34 0.34 Third intensity mean 0.29 0.29 0.29 Polling center ﬁxed effects XXXXXX Interactive factor covariates XXX

Notes: Each specification is estimated using OLS, and includes parish × year fixed effects and year-specific share with a cement floor covariate. The interactive factor covariates are the three first dimensions capturing differences in 2001 census

characteristics across polling centers. All observations are weighted by the number of registered voters. Standard errors are clustered by parish. * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01 from two-sided t tests. ing effect is primarily driven by the 2-3 percentage point decreases—or 0.1-0.15 standard deviation decrease in the Chavista´ vote share—in polling centers where more than 50% of households lost RCTV, regardless of whether the fraction lies between 50% and 75% or above 75%. For the rea- sons highlighted by the model, this effect—which can be considered the net effect of sanctioning and favorable news consumption—is likely to represent a lower bound on the sanctioning effect arising from removing a popular television network. Panels B shows that reduced support for Chavez´ was more pronounced in the elections most proximate to the reform. The slightly larger reductions in support for Chavez´ suggest that, while some punishment may have persisted into 2012 and 2013, the greatest sanctioning occurred fairly immediately after RCTV’s license was revoked. This is consistent with voters obtaining additional (offsetting or non-compounding) information over time that further updated voters’ beliefs about the government’s willingness to favor particular groups in the population. Consider, for example, the government spending boom in the quarter leading up to the 2012 presidential election. Since 2003, Chavez´ had branded his social programs missions; the year leading up the 2012 presidential witnessed the introduction of new missions with names like Mission Housing (Mision´ Vivienda) and Mission My Well-Equipped House (Mi Casa Bien Equipada)(Lopez´ Maya and Lander 2012). The distribution of these benefits undoubtedly affected voters’ perceptions of Chavismo’s distribu- tional priorities, in ways not perfectly correlated with the RCTV treatment. Moreover, although Globovision’s relatively critical coverage in the wake of the reform appears to have further reduced Chavez’s´ vote share, the negative electoral effect is not entirely driven by voters having access to Globovision. The results in panel C, which excludes the municipalities with widespread access to Globovision, indicate that the reduction in Chavez’s´ vote share was notably lower where Globovision was not available to non-cable subscribers. However, the point estimates remain negative for the nonlinear specifications, and statistically significant after some covariate adjustments (see below). Our nationwide results below reinforce this claim. Our findings are thus consistent with Globovision becoming an influential critical voice after 2007 (Knight and Tribin

32 2018), although our estimates nevertheless suggest that the limited reach of Globovision meant that its impact was relatively minimal in comparison with the broader electoral effect of revoking RCTV’s license.

4.3.2 Robustness checks

We demonstrate the robustness of these findings in several ways. We start by assessing potential violations of our identifying assumptions. First, although they are not required for causal identifi- cation, we include polling center fixed effects in additional specifications to mitigate the risk that a correlation between baseline levels of Chavista´ support and trends in such support, e.g. due to mean-reversion, is not driving the results. The estimates in the second column for each operationalization of losing access to RCTV in Table1 gain a little in terms of precision and generally remain stable, thereby suggesting that time-invariant polling center characteristics do not drive our estimates.17 Second, the third column for each operationalization of losing access to RCTV in Table1 shows that our estimate are robust to further including the year-specific factor variables capturing the three main dimensions characterizing baseline differences across polling centers. These results suggest that we are not simply picking up other shocks that differentially affected the types of voters that also lost access to RCTV. To address the potential concern that 2001 measures of household television and cable access may cease to be valid in 2006, we also proxy for the share of households that lost access to RCTV in 2006 by combining the 2001 and 2011 censuses. While there is a risk that increasing cable ownership between 2001 and 2011 could generate misleading estimates when using only the 2001 census, interpolations rest on assumptions about temporal dynamics and could (in this case) be subject to post-treatment biases. We nevertheless linearly interpolate the 2006 share of households that lost access to RCTV. The estimates in Appendix Table A1 are somewhat noisier—which is 17The inclusion of linear polling center-specific time trends substantially worsened the parallel trends plot, and are thus not included in the analysis. This is likely due to the short time series and inclusion of parish × year fixed effects that absorb many local election-specific effects.

33 consistent with this measure being less accurate—and treatment effects unsurprisingly kick in at lower levels of measured lost access to RCTV. Nevertheless, the point estimates remain negative and of similar magnitudes to Table1, and thus reinforce the ﬁndings using the 2001 measure.

4.3.3 Nationwide parish-level results

The preceding results show a clear drop in support for Chavez´ among voters that lost access to RCTV in six predominantly urban states. However, it is not obvious that such effects extend to other parts of the country where support for Chavez´ was greater over the period under study. We next seek to generalize our ﬁndings across country, albeit by instead estimating a weighted average of estimands (19) and 20 or just estimand (20), because cable coverage is far less prevalent nationwide. We implement a similar nationwide design using parish-level variation in the intensity of losing RCTV:

Chavez´ pst = αLost RCTVp + β Lost RCTVp × Post-RCTV closuret

+θst + δtShare cement ﬂoorp + εpst, (23)

where θst now captures state × election fixed effects. While this higher level of aggregation means that we can only exploit within-state × election variation in loss of access to RCTV, it also allows us to examine the extent to which the effects permeated across the country. Since this reduces the design’s plausibility to some degree, we adjust for the percentage of households with cement floors—a proxy for the share living in barrios—and allow its correlation with Chavez´ support to vary across each election. This amounts to allowing vote shares to follow different trends in barrios than in other (formal) urban neighborhoods. This is especially important because treated households—those with televisions but without cable—are concentrated in barrios; including trends-by-floor-type helps ensure that our estimates of interest do not simply pick up dif-

34 ferential barrio trends. Appendix Figures A2 and A3 show graphically that the inclusion of these controls yields broadly parallel trends. The estimates in Table2 indicate that losing RCTV had broadly similar net effects in the full national sample. For example, the slightly larger point estimates—relative to Table1—in column (4) of panel A in Table2 represent almost a 0.2 standard deviation change in electoral support. This may reﬂect the larger differential effect relative to households without a television, which our model suggests can be attributed to a greater endogenous content effect.18 This interpretation is further supported by the larger effect estimates when the sample is restricted to parishes where fewer than 5% of households had cable television in 2001 in Table3. Consistent with our model’s prediction when cable is relatively uncommon nationwide, our estimates of estimand 20 are notably larger than for estimand (19). Although other factors beyond our model could account for heterogeneous responses, the wafer thin electoral margins in the 2007 referendum suggest that Chavez’s´ decision to revoke RCTV’s license could have altered the outcome of the constitutional reform.

4.4 Next steps

We have purchased a variety of Nielsen datasets to better understand television consumption dynamics. However, obtaining this data has—perhaps unsurprisingly in the current political climate— been slow. However, once we have this, we intend to better illuminate the mechanisms driving the reduction in Chavez’s vote share in several ways:

• Use Nielsen programming data to help establish whether drops in vote share are greatest at polling centers that were most likely to watch RCTV’s popular non-political programming (e.g. telenovelas) or RCTV’s opposition political programming. While the former would capture the sanctioning effect, the latter would be more consistent with the news consump- 18Since measurement error introduced by aggregation may plausibly be classical, these estimates might underestimate the true effect—and differentially more so than the polling center analyses in Table1.

35 Table 2: Effect of losing RCTV in 2007 on electoral support for Chavez,´ using our nationwide parish-level level data

Chavez´ vote share (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) Panel A: All elections Share with TV without cable (2001) × Post-RCTV closure -0.082*** -0.083*** 0.021 (0.016) (0.016) (0.015) Share with TV without cable (2001)>0.5 × Post-RCTV closure -0.022*** -0.024*** 0.001 (0.006) (0.006) (0.005) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.019 -0.017 0.008 (0.019) (0.017) (0.015) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.039** -0.039** 0.008 (0.018) (0.017) (0.015) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure -0.049*** -0.049*** 0.012 (0.019) (0.017) (0.016)

Observations 7,175 7,175 6,895 7,175 7,175 6,895 7,175 7,175 6,895 Unique parishes 1,025 1,025 985 1,025 1,025 985 1,025 1,025 985 Outcome mean 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 Outcome standard deviation 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 Intensity mean 0.63 0.63 0.63 0.79 0.79 0.78 0.18 0.18 0.18 Second intensity mean 0.49 0.49 0.49 Third intensity mean 0.29 0.29 0.29 Panel B: 1998-2009 elections Share with TV without cable (2001) × Post-RCTV closure -0.084*** -0.088*** 0.011 (0.016) (0.016) (0.015) Share with TV without cable (2001)>0.5 × Post-RCTV closure -0.025*** -0.027*** -0.003 (0.005) (0.005) (0.004) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.022 -0.017 0.006 (0.019) (0.017) (0.015) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.044** -0.042** 0.003 (0.019) (0.017) (0.015)

36 Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure -0.053*** -0.051*** 0.007 (0.019) (0.017) (0.015)

Observations 5,125 5,125 4,925 5,125 5,125 4,925 5,125 5,125 4,925 Unique parishes 1,025 1,025 985 1,025 1,025 985 1,025 1,025 985 Outcome mean 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 Outcome standard deviation 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 Intensity mean 0.63 0.63 0.63 0.79 0.79 0.78 0.18 0.18 0.18 Second intensity mean 0.49 0.49 0.49 Third intensity mean 0.29 0.29 0.29 Panel C: Excluding municipalities with access to Globovision Share with TV without cable (2001) × Post-RCTV closure -0.060*** -0.065*** 0.015 (0.015) (0.015) (0.015) Share with TV without cable (2001)>0.5 × Post-RCTV closure -0.018*** -0.020*** 0.000 (0.005) (0.005) (0.005) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.020 -0.018 0.005 (0.018) (0.017) (0.016) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.035** -0.036** 0.005 (0.018) (0.017) (0.016) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure -0.041** -0.041** 0.009 (0.018) (0.017) (0.016)

Observations 6,888 6,888 6,608 6,888 6,888 6,608 6,888 6,888 6,608 Unique parishes 984 984 944 984 984 944 984 984 944 Outcome mean 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.61 Outcome standard deviation 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 Intensity mean 0.63 0.63 0.62 0.78 0.78 0.78 0.18 0.18 0.18 Second intensity mean 0.49 0.49 0.49 Third intensity mean 0.29 0.29 0.29 Polling center ﬁxed effects XXXXXX Interactive factor covariates XXX

Notes: Each specification is estimated using OLS, and includes state × year fixed effects and year-specific share with a cement floor covariate. The interactive factor covariates are the three first dimensions capturing differences in 2001 census

characteristics across polling centers. All observations are weighted by the number of registered voters. Standard errors are clustered by parish. * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01 from two-sided t tests. Table 3: Effect of losing RCTV in 2007 on electoral support for Chavez,´ in parishes where fewer than 5% of households have cable television

Chavez´ vote share (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) Panel A: All elections Share with TV without cable (2001) × Post-RCTV closure -0.190*** -0.188*** -0.142*** (0.030) (0.029) (0.038) Share with TV without cable (2001)>0.5 × Post-RCTV closure -0.061*** -0.060*** -0.018 (0.017) (0.017) (0.015) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.042 -0.041 -0.033 (0.030) (0.028) (0.026) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.082*** -0.080*** -0.051** (0.027) (0.026) (0.026) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure -0.114*** -0.113*** -0.071*** (0.027) (0.026) (0.027)

Observations 2,842 2,842 2,737 2,842 2,842 2,737 2,842 2,842 2,737 Unique parishes 406 406 391 406 406 391 406 406 391 Outcome mean 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 Outcome standard deviation 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 Intensity mean 0.70 0.70 0.69 0.90 0.90 0.90 0.07 0.07 0.07 Second intensity mean 0.44 0.44 0.43 Third intensity mean 0.46 0.46 0.46 Panel B: 1998-2009 elections Share with TV without cable (2001) × Post-RCTV closure -0.211*** -0.207*** -0.145*** (0.028) (0.026) (0.036) Share with TV without cable (2001)>0.5 × Post-RCTV closure -0.071*** -0.068*** -0.021 (0.015) (0.014) (0.013) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.055** -0.053** -0.045* (0.028) (0.026) (0.024) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.102*** -0.097*** -0.064***

37 (0.026) (0.024) (0.024) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure -0.135*** -0.131*** -0.085*** (0.027) (0.025) (0.026)

Observations 2,030 2,030 1,955 2,030 2,030 1,955 2,030 2,030 1,955 Unique parishes 406 406 391 406 406 391 406 406 391 Outcome mean 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 Outcome standard deviation 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 Intensity mean 0.70 0.70 0.69 0.90 0.90 0.90 0.07 0.07 0.07 Second intensity mean 0.44 0.44 0.43 Third intensity mean 0.46 0.46 0.46 Panel C: Excluding municipalities with access to Globovision Share with TV without cable (2001) × Post-RCTV closure -0.185*** -0.184*** -0.139*** (0.030) (0.030) (0.038) Share with TV without cable (2001)>0.5 × Post-RCTV closure -0.061*** -0.060*** -0.019 (0.017) (0.017) (0.015) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.042 -0.041 -0.033 (0.030) (0.028) (0.026) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.082*** -0.080*** -0.052** (0.027) (0.026) (0.026) Share with TV without cable (2001)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure -0.113*** -0.112*** -0.072*** (0.027) (0.026) (0.027)

Observations 2,828 2,828 2,723 2,828 2,828 2,723 2,828 2,828 2,723 Unique parishes 404 404 389 404 404 389 404 404 389 Outcome mean 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 0.66 Outcome standard deviation 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12 Intensity mean 0.70 0.70 0.69 0.90 0.90 0.90 0.07 0.07 0.07 Second intensity mean 0.44 0.44 0.43 Third intensity mean 0.46 0.46 0.46 Polling center ﬁxed effects XXXXXX Interactive factor covariates XXX

characteristics across polling centers. All observations are weighted by the number of registered voters. Standard errors are clustered by parish. * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01 from two-sided t tests. tion effect. This analysis would thus help us to show that both effects are present, rather than just that the former dominates the latter, which could be consistent with there being no news consumption or endogenous content effect.

• Further illuminate the news consumption effect by using Nielsen programming data to establish how total TV consumption and the bundle of channels and programming changed after the reform.

• To better understand what exactly voters are updating negatively about, we intend to use Latinobarometro survey data to examine changes in beliefs about incumbent type and the degree to which Venezuela is a democracy. While this is straight-forward to implement using a pre vs. post comparison, we hope to obtain better identiﬁcation by implementing a difference-in-differences design that further leverages differences across respondents in either possession of a television or municipal cable shares. Unfortunately, such analyses are likely to be noisy due to high TV ownership in surveys and the imprecision of municipal cable shares.

5 Endogenous content effects

The differential decline in vote share among voters that lost access to RCTV suggests—at least on the face of it—that the shutdown could have backﬁred. This is especially plausible because Chavez´ experienced the only electoral electoral defeat of his presidency in December 2007, when narrowly voted against his proposed constitutional reforms by 50.65% to 49.35%. We might then reasonably conclude that the decision not to renew RCTV’s broadcasting license cost Chavez´ the 2007 constitutional referendum. Certainly, this interpretation would be consistent with survey data and anecdotal evidence: 70% of Venezuelans disagreed with Chavez’s´ decision not to renew RCTV’s license, and the protests against the decision helped fuel protests against the constitutional

38 amendments. However, without assuming that no other common shock affected vote choices after 2007, the preceding difference-in-differences design cannot illuminate whether revoking RCTV’s license cost Chavez´ votes overall. Although we lack a credible design to identify the overall effect of this decision, this section assesses the possibility that revoking RCTV’s license caused other less critical public broadcast television stations to report more favorably on Chavez´ after RCTV’s license was revoked. As our theory section notes, this was a key condition for the revocation of RCTV’s license to have yielded a gain overall for Chavez´ when the sanctioning effect dominates among voters with televisions without access to cable.

5.1 Descriptive accounts

After Chavez´ took office as president in 1999, all three major broadcast stations—RCTV,Venevision,´ and Televen—took´ an aggressive anti-Chavez´ line. Perhaps the clearest example of this was their coverage during April 2002, when a joint civilian-military coup d’etat briefly removed Chavez´ from power. RCTV anchors “encouraged citizens to take to the streets in protest, in order to am- plify the appearance of popular support for Chavez’s´ ouster. The following day, when the coup leader took office, the station congratulated the new government and hosted its spokespeople. On April 13, RCTV aired cartoons and Pretty Woman instead of broadcasting the massive pro-Chavez´ protests that helped restore him to power” (Kronick 2007). It was these coverage choices that Chavez´ cited when announcing his decision not to renew RCTV’s broadcasting license. Two years later, in the early summer of 2004, opinion polls predicted that Chavez´ would win a recall referendum scheduled for that August. With that victory in sight, the government asked the major broadcast television stations to moderate their editorial lines. Jimmy Carter, a personal friend of Gustavo Cisneros, head of Venevision,´ brokered a meeting between Cisneros and Chavez;´ Venevision´ subsequently “softened” its coverage (Romero 2007). Televen´ followed suit. RCTV, in contrast, continued with its strident anti-Chavez´ reporting.

39 That the prospect of losing a broadcasting license drove media elites to self-censor, as Reuters and other news outlets described it at the time, has been acknowledged by Cisneros himself. In a 2007 interview with the New York Times, he emphasized that the government had renewed Venevision’s´ broadcasting license for only ﬁve years, such that Chavez´ would make a renewal decision before the end of his term (Romero 7/5/2007). This is broadly consistent with our the- oretical model, which highlights that some media outlets are likely to be more supportive of the government’s objectives than others. If the self-censorship of Venevision´ and Televen´ pushed voters toward Chavez,´ the RCTV decision could have helped Chavez´ and his successor go on to win the elections that keep them in power as of this writing. Although our estimates imply a somewhat persistent differential loss of votes in locations where many voters lost access to RCTV, this could be more than compensated for by reductions in critical media coverage across the media spectrum that could increase total support for Chavez´ across the country.

5.2 Quantitative analyses

We intend to assess the changes in reporting—and their electoral impact—after RCTV’s license was revoked more systematically. In particular, we are collecting data to conduct the following analyses:

• Collect news content time series data in order to examine changes in the perspective and tone of reporting on Chavez’s´ government by RCTV’s main broadcast competitors, Venevision,´ and Televen,´ before and after RCTV’s license was revoked. If possible, we can compare this with the content of outlets that were already only on cable (or possibly Globovision). While a moderation clearly occurred after 2004, this analysis will assess whether further moderation occurred after RCTV’s license was revoked.

• To assess whether any such changes actually increased electoral support for Chavez,´ we hope

40 to obtain antennae data that would allow us to compare locations with and without access to at least one of Venevision,´ and Televen´ before and after 2007. Ideally, we would be able to restrict this sample to areas with televisions and without access to cable, in order to estimate the electoral analog of estimand (21).

6 Conclusion

Twenty-first century autocrats are thought to “rule by a velvet fist:” whereas their twentieth-century counterparts used violence to stay in power, today’s undemocratic rulers use cooptation and the control of information (Guriev and Treisman 2015, 2016). Muffling or silencing opposition media outlets is a key tool of the control of information; Vladimir Putin, for example, had been in power for one year when the state-owned Gazprom took over an opposition television station whose coverage had cost Putin’s coalition 8.9 percentage points in recent parliamentary elections (Enikolopov, Petrova and Zhuravskaya 2011). As Putin later remarked, “Contrary to a common perception, mass media is an instrument, rather than an institution” (Enikolopov, Petrova and Zhu- ravskaya 2011:3253). We study a key moment in Hugo Chavez’s´ attempt to construct “communicational hegemony” (as he called it) in Venezuela: his decision not to renew the broadcasting license of RCTV, which was then Venezuela’s most-watched station. Two unusual features of this episode make it especially interesting for learning about media and voting in competitive authoritarian regimes. First, rather than simply alter the news content, the non-renewal of RCTV’s broadcasting license entailed the disappearance of all RCTV programming from the airwaves—including the station’s beloved soap operas and other entertainment programs. Second, because RCTV quickly returned as a cable station, not all households were equally affected: those without cable or satellite lost RCTV, while those with subscriptions did not. These features of the RCTV episode allow us to weigh competing effects of the non-renewal

41 decision: the news consumption effect, in which the loss of opposition news affects voters’ beliefs about the incumbent’s level of corruption (broadly construed), alongside the compounding endogenous content effect capturing changes in reporting induced by changes in media market competition; and the sanctioning effect, in which voters punish the incumbent for depriving them of a valued source of entertainment and/or information. (We interpret this punishment as an expression of pessimism about future policy decisions.) Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that the sanctioning effect dominated in this case. This ﬁnding is consistent with qualitative and survey-based evidence indicating strong public dissatisfaction with the RCTV decision. We do not interpret these results as evidence that Chavez´ made a strategic mistake. Rather, the preceding results could be consistent with electoral gains for Chavez´ in the presence of a signiﬁcant endogenous content effect. As we explain in Section 5.1, the threat of license non-renewal and the reality RCTV’s disappearance from the airwaves dramatically changed the behavior of other media outlets. Most importantly, major RCTV competitors Venevision´ and Televen´ moderated their editorial lines, canceling adversarial programming and shifting the tone of remaining shows. The head of Venevision´ said explicitly in interviews that he made these changes motivated by fear for the station’s survival (Romero 7/5/2007). Our model formalizes this logic, clarifying the conditions under which these endogenous content effects, together with news consumption effects, might outweigh even sanctioning effects—even ones as powerful as those we observe here.

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47 Figure A1: Positive views of Chavez´ and of the country situation

(a) Chavez´ approval (b) Country situation Negative positive perception of Chavez Negative positive perception of the country 80 .8 Positive Negative Don't know

70 .6

60 .4

50 .2 Proportion of respondents survey Proportion of respondents survey Proportion

40 0 2005m1 2006m7 2008m1 2009m7 2005m1 2006m7 2008m1 2009m7

(a) Unconditional (b) Conditional on parish × year fixed effects and Diff in diff year-specific cement floor share adjustment .6 Diff in diff .6 .5 .5 .4 .4 .3 Slope .3 .2 Slope .2 .1 .1 0 2000 2004 20062007 2009 20122013 0 2000 2004 20062007 2009 20122013 Figure A2: Parish level correlation between households with television but no cable and votes for Chavez´

A1 Table A1: Effect of losing RCTV in 2007 on electoral support for Chavez,´ deﬁning intensity according to an interpolated 2006 census measures of access to television and cable

Chavez´ vote share (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Panel A: All elections Share with TV without cable (2006) × Post-RCTV closure -0.056** -0.052*** -0.041** (0.023) (0.020) (0.019) Share with TV without cable (2006)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.011** -0.013*** -0.009** (0.005) (0.005) (0.004) Share with TV without cable (2006)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.025** -0.024** -0.015* (0.010) (0.009) (0.008) Share with TV without cable (2006)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure -0.027* -0.027** -0.013 (0.015) (0.013) (0.010)

Observations 8,575 8,575 8,575 8,575 8,575 8,575 Unique parishes 109 109 109 109 109 109 Outcome mean 0.49 0.49 0.49 0.49 0.49 0.49 Outcome standard deviation 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 Intensity mean 0.63 0.63 0.63 0.36 0.36 0.36 Second intensity mean 0.40 0.40 0.40 Third intensity mean 0.12 0.12 0.12 Panel B: 2000-2009 elections Share with TV without cable (2006) × Post-RCTV closure -0.070*** -0.068*** -0.056*** (0.022) (0.020) (0.020) Share with TV without cable (2006)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.014*** -0.015*** -0.011** (0.005) (0.005) (0.004) Share with TV without cable (2006)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.031*** -0.031*** -0.021** (0.010) (0.010) (0.008) Share with TV without cable (2006)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure -0.036** -0.036*** -0.021** (0.014) (0.013) (0.010)

Observations 6,125 6,125 6,125 6,125 6,125 6,125 Unique parishes 109 109 109 109 109 109 Outcome mean 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.51 Outcome standard deviation 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21 Intensity mean 0.63 0.63 0.63 0.36 0.36 0.36 Second intensity mean 0.40 0.40 0.40 Third intensity mean 0.12 0.12 0.12 Panel C: Excluding municipalities with access to Globovision Share with TV without cable (2006) × Post-RCTV closure 0.016 0.001 0.016 (0.025) (0.018) (0.021) Share with TV without cable (2006)∈ (0.25,0.5]× Post-RCTV closure -0.010 -0.011* -0.007 (0.008) (0.006) (0.005) Share with TV without cable (2006)∈ (0.5,0.75]× Post-RCTV closure -0.001 -0.003 0.005 (0.010) (0.008) (0.007) Share with TV without cable (2006)∈ (0.75,1]× Post-RCTV closure 0.019* 0.010 0.021** (0.011) (0.009) (0.009)

Observations 3,563 3,563 3,563 3,563 3,563 3,563 Unique parishes 72 72 72 72 72 72 Outcome mean 0.53 0.53 0.53 0.53 0.53 0.53 Outcome standard deviation 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.17 Intensity mean 0.59 0.59 0.59 0.43 0.43 0.43 Second intensity mean 0.36 0.36 0.36 Third intensity mean 0.06 0.06 0.06 Polling center ﬁxed effects XXXX Interactive factor covariates XX

Notes: Each specification is estimated using OLS, and includes parish × year fixed effects and year-specific share with a cement floor covariate. The interactive factor covariates are the three

ﬁrst dimensions capturing differences in 2001 census characteristics across polling centers. All observations are weighted by the number of registered voters. Standard errors are clustered

by parish. * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01 from two-sided t tests.

A2 Table A2: Factor loadings used to construct the factor variables in the polling center analyses

Factor loadings Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Share with a land title 0.0014 0.2817 0.6809 Share of foreigners 0.3789 -0.0138 -0.76 Share of young people -0.7222 0.4174 0.3087 Number of persons -0.4731 0.1174 0.1761 Share of married heads of household 0.8512 0.1938 -0.0947 Share of female heads of household 0.2025 -0.8464 -0.0766 Share with a partner -0.0357 0.9689 0.0488 Share female -0.4412 0.2442 0.0006 Share with a radio 0.3815 -0.0054 0.1846 Share indigenous 0.0984 -0.0443 -0.0356 Share literate 0.7218 -0.0514 -0.058 Share with a bachelors degree 0.928 -0.0935 0.0343 Share unemployed 0.04 -0.1435 0.1686 Share deﬁned as impoverished -0.9049 0.0941 0.1379 Share with electricity in their household 0.131 -0.1012 0.0235 Share with running water in their household 0.0261 -0.0767 -0.0764 Share without a vehicle -0.4639 -0.1637 -0.0228 Share with cements ﬂoors -0.869 0.2011 0.0624 Share with at least one bathroom 0.4162 -0.0411 0.0628

Note: The loadings are from the unrotated factors.

(a) Unconditional (b) Conditional on parish × year fixed effects and Diff in diff year-specific cement floor share adjustment Diff in diff .2 .2

.15

Slope .15

Slope .1

.1 2000 2004 20062007 2009 20122013 2000 2004 20062007 2009 20122013 Figure A3: Correlation between parish where more than 50% of households have a television but no cable and votes for Chavez´

A3 Table A3: Factor loadings used to construct the factor variables in the parish-level analyses

Factor loadings Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Factor 4 Share with a land title -0.5009 0.3534 -0.3425 -0.2122 Share of foreigners 0.272 -0.4376 0.1965 0.4112 Share of young people -0.7661 0.5181 -0.1222 0.1689 Number of persons 0.319 0.3001 0.0767 0.3259 Share of married heads of household 0.7892 -0.1638 -0.4579 -0.0441 Share of female heads of household 0.841 -0.0394 0.3653 -0.1428 Share with a partner -0.4724 0.3585 -0.6294 0.3501 Share female -0.8792 -0.0961 0.0342 -0.0599 Share with a radio 0.8029 0.2345 -0.0505 -0.1515 Share indigenous -0.2164 -0.2282 0.1136 0.561 Share literate 0.8396 0.4228 -0.1074 0.0931 Share with a bachelors degree 0.9378 -0.0387 -0.2403 0.0645 Share unemployed 0.2472 0.369 -0.1756 0.0939 Share deﬁned as impoverished -0.9288 0.0754 0.1604 -0.1083 Share with electricity in their household 0.5397 0.4048 0.0814 0.1101 Share with running water in their household 0.6749 0.3969 0.1914 -0.03 Share without a vehicle -0.1391 0.1961 0.3974 0.3298 Share with cements ﬂoors -0.9328 0.2007 0.1046 -0.066 Share with at least one bathroom -0.0071 0.6752 0.4953 -0.0865

Note: The loadings are from the unrotated factors.