Politicians under Investigation: The News Media’s Effect on the Likelihood of Resignation

Jil Sörensen and Marcel Garz

VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of news media on the probability of resignation from office of politicians being subject to criminal investigation. Using data on cases in which the political immunity of German representatives was lifted, we find that resignations are more common when the media covers the case intensely. The amounts of this news coverage, in turn, depend on the availability of other newsworthy, exogenous events. Therefore, we instrument for coverage of lifts of immunity with the overall news pressure. We estimate the causal effect and find that a 1 standard deviation increase in the amount of the coverage raises the likelihood of resignation by 22.3 percentage points.

Keywords: news media; political accountability; prosecution; resignation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K14 L82 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul and nep-pol
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Related works:
Journal Article: Politicians under investigation: The news Media's effect on the likelihood of resignation (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc16:145531

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