Francesca Jensenius
(University of Oslo)
will give a presentation on
Political Motives and the News Market: Quasi-experimental Evidence and New Data from India
Abstract:
To what extent are media markets in democracies influenced by changes in political motives? We build a novel panel dataset of newspaper markets in India between 2002 and 2017 to measure the impact of changes in electoral incentives on how these markets develop over time. We exploit the announcement of an exogenous change in the boundaries of electoral constituencies to causally identify the relationship between the (future) electoral importance of news markets and the change in the number and circulation of newspapers. Using an event study and a staggered difference-in-difference approach, we show that markets that became more electorally important experienced a significant rise in both circulation and number of titles per capita. Both supply and demand seem to drive the increase, but we estimate that the former explains almost all the variation in the short run and around $60\%$ in the long run. Finally, we document how effects vary with prior levels of political competition and newspapers characteristics, and discuss implications for voting behavior and democratic accountability.
(co-authored with Julia Cagé and Guilhem Cassan)