Political Determinants of the News Market: Novel Data and Quasi-Experimental Evidence from India

Julia Cagé, Guilhem Cassan and Francesca R. Jensenius

No 12576, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Information conveyed through news media influences political behavior. But to what extent are media markets themselves shaped by political determinants? We build a novel panel dataset of newspaper markets in India from 2002 to 2017 to measure the impact of changes in apportionment on the development of the news industry over time. We exploit the announcement of an exogenous change in the boundaries of electoral constituencies (the 2008 delimitation) to causally identify the relationship between the (future) apportionment of news markets and the change in the number and circulation of newspapers. Using an event-study model and a staggered Difference-in-Differences approach, we show that markets that faced an increase in representation experienced a significant rise in both circulation and the number of titles per capita. News and current affairs newspapers respond more to this increase. Furthermore, we document various dimensions of heterogeneity and show in particular that the magnitude of the estimated effects is larger in places with a relatively low level of newspaper and political competition prior to the 2008 delimitation.

Keywords: newspapers; media; India; malapportionment; political representation; redistricting; delimitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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