The persuasive power of the fourth estate: Estimating the effect of newspaper endorsements: 1960–1980

Steven Sprick Schuster

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2023, vol. 207, issue C, 496-510

Abstract: This paper estimates the persuasive effect of newspaper presidential endorsements on its readers over five elections (1960-1980), a period when the vast majority of newspaper endorsements were for the Republican candidate. I find that newspaper endorsements caused a large, significant change in readers’ preferred candidate and Republican endorsements, despite being more common, were at least as effective as Democratic endorsements. Because my empirical strategy allows me to estimate causal effects for a large sample of U.S. newspapers in each election year, I can calculate the cumulative effect of newspaper endorsements. I estimate that over the 5 elections covered in my sample, U.S. newspapers shifted more than 17 million voters toward Republican candidates.

Keywords: Presidential Elections; Newspapers; Media History; Voter Opinion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268123000239
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:207:y:2023:i:c:p:496-510

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2023.01.023

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 ().