The Political Legacy of Commercial Television: Evidence from the Rise (and Fall) of Berlusconi∗ Ruben Durantey Paolo Pinottiz Andrea Tesei§ March 2013 ABSTRACT We investigate the long-term political effects of early exposure to Berlusconi’s TV network, Mediaset, exploiting its staggered introduction over the national territory and variation in signal reception due to idiosyncratic geomorphological factors. We find that municipalities exposed to Mediaset prior to 1985 exhibit greater electoral support for Berlusconi’s party - between 1 and 2 percentage points - when he first ran for office in 1994, relative to municipalities that were exposed only later on. The difference is extremely persistent, disappearing only with the elections of 2013 - about 20 years after the entry of Berlusconi into politics. Any effect of differential exposure before 1985 can hardly be explained by partisan bias in the news, as the latter were introduced on Mediaset channels only starting in 1991, at which time the network was available to the entire population. Instead, we present evidence that earlier exposure to commercial TV is associated with a substantial decline in civic participation between 1981 and 1991, which later favored the political success of Berlusconi. ∗We thank Ruben Enikolopov, Brian Knight, David Weil, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya for very helpful com- ments and seminar participants at Bocconi, CREI, NYU, MIT, Sciences Po, Brown, Dartmouth, Paris 1, WZB, Surrey, Queen Mary, Yale and EIEF for helpful discussion. We are also grateful to Ben Olken for sharing with us the ITM software. We thank Nicola D’Amelio and Giuseppe Piraino for their assistance with the collection of electoral data and Laura Litvine for her outstanding help with the digitalization of the transmitters data. Ruben Durante thanks the Sciences Po Research Board for financial support. ySciences Po; contact: [email protected] (corresponding author). zBocconi University; contact: [email protected]. §Queen Mary University; contact: [email protected]. 1 1. INTRODUCTION The Italian national elections of February 2013, held amidst the worst economic and political crisis of the post-war period, witnessed the defeat of the two political coalitions that ruled the country over the past two decades. These years were characterized by the undisputed leadership of Silvio Berlusconi over the centre-right coalition, which ultimately governed the country for most of this period. According to many observers, this extraordinary po- litical longevity is intimately related to the ownership of the country’s largest private TV conglomerate, Mediaset (Durante and Knight, 2012). A burgeoning literature in economics suggests that politically-oriented media may influence electoral results by exposing voters to partisan bias in news and information programs. In particular, DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) and Enikolopov, Petrova, and Zhuravskaya (2011) show that exposure to Fox News (a conservative network) and NTV (an independent news channel) had significant effects on voting choices in the U.S. and Russia, respectively. Another strand of literature looks at the effects of media along other dimensions of indi- vidual behavior. Path-breaking work by Robert Putnam (2000) blames television, and in particular light entertainment shows, for civic dis-engagement in the U.S. during the post- war period. More recently, Olken (2009) documents a negative relationship between the number of TV channels available across different areas of Indonesia and several aspects of social capital (trust, participation in social organizations and control of corruption). On re- lated matters, exposure to soap operas reduces fertility and increases divorce rates in Brazil (Chong, Duryea, and La Ferrara, 2008; Chong and La Ferrara, 2009), satellite and cable TV contribute to women empowerment in India (Jensen and Oster, 2009) and exposure to West- ern TV drove consumers in former East Germany toward goods that were more intensively advertised before the re-unification (Bursztyn and Cantoni, 2012). This body of work points at an important role of television for the diffusion of cultural models that, once adopted, may have significant and persistent effects on individual behavior. So far, these two strands of literature have evolved in parallel. However, adherence to new cultural models may well be reflected into different voting behavior. If this is the case, commercial television may have significant (and perhaps subtler) political consequences, even in the absence of explicit political bias. This paper shows that this is exactly what happened in Italy over the last 30 years: differential exposure to non-informative, light- entertainment TV shows had significant and long-lasting effects on electoral outcomes over the following decades. Our empirical analysis compares voting behavior, and in particular the electoral support for Berlusconi after he entered politics in 1994, between Italian municipalities that were exposed 2 to Mediaset before 1985, relative to municipalities that were exposed only later. The data combine unique information on the early availability of Mediaset channels, at a granular level of geographic detail, with municipality-level data on electoral results over the period 1976-2013. Since the transmitters active in 1985 were inherited from a multitude of local televisions that were progressively incorporated into the network, their location and power was not immediately functional to the later political ambitions of Berlusconi. Moreover, we restrict to residual variation in Mediaset signal intensity due to idiosyncratic geomorpholog- ical factors, rather than by the location and power of the transmitters, on the grounds that the former component of variation should be uncorrelated to other determinants of voting. Evi- dence from electoral outcomes in the pre-exposure period (1976-1979) allows for an indirect test of this orthogonality condition. Turning to our main results, we find that the personal party of Berlusconi, Forza Italia, ob- tained a consistently higher share of votes in municipalities that were earlier exposed to Mediaset. The effect - between 1 and 2 percentage points - is very precisely estimated and persists until the 2008 elections, about 25 years after the differential exposure to Mediaset and 15 years after Berlusconi entered politics. The results are remarkably similar when we restrict the comparison to municipalities with signal intensity just above and just below the threshold that allows for the actual reception of Mediaset, or to pairs of neighbor municipali- ties with similar predicted signal in the absence of obstacles. We also show that the estimated effect is higher in areas where people spend more time watching TV. Overall, these results uncover a significant electoral advantage for Berlusconi in municipal- ities that were exposed to his television network before 1985. Interestingly, any such effect can hardly be attributed to explicit partisan bias in news, as the programming schedule of Mediaset at that time was devoted exclusively to action dramas, soap operas, quiz and gossip shows. The first newscast would arrive only in 1991, at which time Mediaset was avail- able to the entire Italian population (other information programs were also introduced in later years). We also exclude that earlier exposure favored a higher viewership of Mediaset newscasts after they were introduced (for instance, because of habit formation or attachment to the network), as individual-level survey data for the period 1994-2006 do not reveal any systematic difference in this respect between individuals that were differentially exposed; opinions about the honesty and ability of Berlusconi are also similar. Therefore, greater support for Forza Italia among voters who were first exposed to Mediaset (confirmed also in the individual-level regressions) is not explained by access to different sources of information in 1994, nor by different beliefs about Berlusconi. An alternative explanation is that voters filter the same information and beliefs through the lens of different values and preferences, which were shaped in turn by differential exposure to Mediaset. The 3 advent of Mediaset doubled the number of TV channels (from three to six) and expanded dramatically the range of TV shows in the direction of light entertainment (as opposed to the educational vocation of public television at that time). According to Putnam (2000), both these factors would bring a decrease in civic engagement, which could in turn affect voting behavior (the more so for individuals that were exposed earlier). Consistent with this hypothesis, we observe a strong differential decline, between 1981 and 2001, in the incidence of voluntarily associations (one of the measures of civic engagement used by Putnam, 2000) in municipalities that were exposed before 1985, relative to mu- nicipalities that were exposed only later. Participation to voluntarily associations and other measures of civic engagement are in turn negatively associated with voting for Forza Italia, both at the municipality- and at the individual-level. Although we are extremely careful in attaching any causal interpretation to these last findings, they are consistent with the diffu- sion of a cultural model of individualism and civic dis-engagement, on the part of Mediaset, which could have ultimately favored the political success of Berlusconi. These results complement those of Barone, D’Acunto, and Narciso (2012). Using electoral data for a local election