Electoral cycle bias in the media coverage of corruption news
Marco Le Moglie and
Gilberto Turati ()
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2019, vol. 163, issue C, 140-157
Abstract:
We investigate the existence of an ‘electoral cycle bias’ in the timing of media coverage of news with high political salience. In particular, we analyze how the electoral cycles at the regional level influence the coverage of news about corruption scandals in the Italian Regional Health Systems by two important national newspapers having opposite ideology, La Repubblica (left-wing oriented) and Il Giornale (right-wing oriented). Our findings show that Il Giornalesignificantly increases the number of articles about corruption scandals involving left-wing politicians since eight weeks before the elections, while it reduces the number of those about episodes of corruption without any political connection. On the contrary, La Repubblica increases the number of articles about episodes involving right-wing politicians only between four to eight weeks before the elections and it decreases those about no political episodes just the week right before them.
Keywords: Media bias; Electoral cycle; Ideology; Corruption scandals; Health system; Italian regions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H51 H75 K42 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268119301441
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: Electoral Cycle Bias in the Media Coverage of Corruption News (2018) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:163:y:2019:i:c:p:140-157
DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2019.05.005
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.
More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().