The Effect of Media on Voters: Field Experiment at the Moscow Mayoral Elections. Maxim Mironov, Alexandra Petrachkova* [email protected], [email protected] October 2014 Abstract This paper studies the effect of negative campaign at the 2013 Moscow mayoral election. The newspaper which criticized the incumbent mayor was distributed near the entrances of randomly selected 20 metro stations during 4 weeks prior the election date. We find that the incumbent mayor got 1.48% less votes at the voting stations located near the points of newspaper distribution. Next, we document the evidence that weekend distribution has 2.4 bigger effect on votes compared to the working day distribution. Finally, we find that the evening distribution is about two times more effective than the morning distribution. JEL classification: D72, L82, P26 Keywords: Elections, Negative campaign, Political economy, Transitional Economy, Media, Voting behavior. * This paper has benefited significantly from suggestions by Juan Pedro Gómez, Garen Markarian, Paolo Porchia, Marco Trombetta, and seminar participants at the IE Business School. 1 Introduction Does the media affect voting behavior? A large body of evidence suggests that the media plays an important role in political outcomes. However, most of the existing evidence comes from established democracies with stable political system and competitive media market. One of a few exceptions is an important paper by Enikolopov, Petrova, and Zhuravskaya (2011) which analyzes the impact of the only independent federal channel NTV on the results of the 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia. The authors provide evidence that exposure to alternative point of view significantly decreases the vote for the government party, increases the combined vote for major opposition parties, and decreases the turnout. Our paper expands the evidence of how the media affects the voting behavior in emerging democracies. We design a fully randomized field experiment to measure the effect of negative campaign on voting behavior. One month prior to the 2013 Moscow mayoral election we published the newspaper that criticized policies of the incumbent mayor. We handed out around 130 000 of the newspaper copies near the entrances of randomly selected 20 metro stations. At each station we distributed the newspaper either in the morning or in the evening, either during working days or on weekends, either in a color version or in a black and white. Then we compared the election results at the voting stations where the newspaper was distributed with the results at those stations where the newspaper was not distributed. This paper makes three contributions to the literature. First, we show that negative campaign has a significant impact on voting behavior. The newspaper decreased the percentage of votes for the incumbent mayor by 1.48 percentage points. Second, the effect of the weekend distribution is 2.4 times larger than the effect of the working day distribution. Finally, it is two times more efficient to hand out the newspapers during the evenings compared to the mornings. 2 The main goal of our paper is to analyze how negative campaign affects the voting preferences. We published a newspaper which criticized the incumbent mayor, Sergei Sobyanin. The newspaper articles discussed alleged corruption of the city government. To design our field experiment, we took all metro stations in Moscow and excluded the stations located outside Moscow and the stations within the metro circle line. We excluded central stations because a significant portion of people who use these metro stations are not locals. Many office buildings, shopping centers, and tourist attractions are located in the center. Thus, the effect of the newspaper at these stations might be diluted. These selection criteria lead to the main sample of 116 metro stations. To create a treatment sample where our newspaper was distributed we also excluded metro stations with adjacent bus or train stations. The majority of people who use these stations are not local, thus the effect of the newspaper cannot be measured. Next, we randomly selected two pairs of adjacent metro lines. We hired two managers to supervise distributors, so the choice of adjacent lines was necessary to facilitate their job. The first pair of lines was Blue West and Dark-blue West, the second pair of lines was Dark-blue East and Red North-East. For each of 20 stations in our treatment sample we randomly assigned 3 variables: a) color or black and white version of the newspaper, b) evening or morning distribution, and c) working days or weekend distribution. Next, we identify 15 closest voting stations to each metro station located no further than 2 kilometers from the metro station. We divide them into three groups: the closest 5 voting stations, from 6th to 10th closest stations, and from 11th to 15th closest stations. Our final sample includes 1485 voting stations and the treatment sample includes 233 voting stations. As a baseline for our analysis we take the 2012 presidential election which was held 18 months prior the Moscow mayoral elections. We find no statistically different results in voting behavior between the entire and treatment sample. We use the results of the presidential elections as control variables in our empirical analysis. 3 Our first important result is that our newspaper decreased the votes for Sobyanin by 1.48 percentage point. This effect decreases with the distance from a metro station where the newspaper was distributed. The effect at the 5 closest voting stations is -1.89%, the effect at the 6-10th closest voting stations is -1.24%, and the effect at the 11-15th closest voting stations is - 0.77% (statistically insignificant). This result is not surprising. People who live further from metro stations are less likely to use the metro system for commuting. Thus, the probability that they receive our newspaper decreases with the distance from metro. On average, our negative campaign decreased the number of votes for Sobyanin by 10.17 votes at every voting station participated in the experiment. The total effect is estimated as minus 2,369 votes for Sobyanin. Who got these votes lost by the incumbent mayor? Three out of five competing candidates benefited from our campaign. Mitrokhin (Yabloko, liberals) got additional 0.66% at the voting stations where the newspaper was distributed, Navalny (People’s alliance, liberals) got +0.55% and Melnikov (Communist Party) got +0.31%. Finally, we analyze which ways of the newspaper distribution are more efficient. We find no difference in the results between color and black and white version of the newspaper. However, given the higher printing costs of a color version, it is more cost efficient to distribute black and white newspaper. The weekend distribution is more efficient than the distribution on working days. The effect of the weekend distribution is minus 2.44% of votes for Sobyanin, and the effect of the working day distribution is -1.07%. We also find that it is more efficient to distribute in the evenings compared to the mornings. The effect of the morning distribution is a 0.96% decrease in votes for Sobyanin while the effect of the evening distribution is a 1.88% decrease. Our research contributes to a growing literature which analyzes the effects of news media on political behavior. The earlier media studies used data from surveys to measure the association between a reported media exposure and political views. For example, White et al. 4 (2005) find strong correlations between specific media slant and viewers’ political attitudes. However, this research design may give biased results because individuals seek information in accordance with their specific political views. Recent contributions to the literature employ natural experiments (Enikolopov, Petrova, and Zhuravskaya (2011) and field experiments (Gerber et al (2009)) to measure media effects on voting preferences. This paper is also related to the literature that measures the impact of negative campaigning on election results for a target, her competitors, and the turnout. Lau and Pomper (2004) analyze negative campaigns for the Senate elections in the US from 1992 to 2002 and find that although they have no affect on the overall stability of political system, they are not an effective strategy to gain votes. As for the turnout, Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995) found that negative campaigns demobilize voters, although later studies show that voters are actually more resilient to negativity than they were previously thought to be (Brooks, 2006). This paper also contributes to the literature that studies the right timing for political communication. Some researchers study the timing of voting decision from voter’s perspective (Fournier et al., 2004) in order to understand responsiveness to a campaign. Others measure effectiveness of message delivery depending on its proximity to the election day (Nickerson, (2007), Panagopoulos (2010)). The paper proceeds as follows. Section 1 describes analytical framework. Section 2 gives background information on Moscow mayoral election and important events preceded it. Section 3 presents the data and experiment design. Section 4 discusses empirical strategy. Section 5 discusses the results. We conclude in Section 6. 1. Analytical Framework The role of mass media in election campaigns constitutes a core research area in political science. The persuasiveness of mass media communication has been debated since the dawn of modern social science. Until the 1980s academics called into question the ability of mass media 5 to have important effects on voter attitudes and behavior. Klapper (1960) summarizes: “(a) mass communication by itself does not act as a necessary and sufficient cause of audience effects and (b) mass communication typically reinforces existing conditions, rather than changing them”. In contrast, the majority of recent studies make a different conclusion, finding that media can have substantial effects. Using the variety of research designs scholars have measured the influence of different types of media (newspapers, TV, radio).