Surprise me if you can: influence of newspaper endorsements in US Presidential elections

Agustin Casas (), Yarine Fawaz and Andre Trindade

UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía

Abstract: Using the daily trade of futures from the prediction markets site Intrade, we pin down the effect of printed newspapers endorsements (announcement of an explicit support for a political candidate) on the candidates' likelihood of winning. It is established that unexpected endorsements have a large impact on voters' behavior. However, we show that this effect is only true when the endorsement is a coherent one: if a newspaper that praises conservative (liberal) policies endorses a candidate with liberal (conservative) ideas, the endorsement does not impact the candidate's probability of winning, as it is regarded as incoherent. Our measure for coherence comes from Gentzkow and Shapiro (2005), but we also use Ansolabehere and Snyder (2004)'s \propensity to endorse Democrats" to show that a surprise endorsement has a large and potentially tipping effect in a tied contest

JEL-codes: D7 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cul and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/rest/api/core/bitstreams ... f70fc5e60609/content (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: SURPRISE ME IF YOU CAN: THE INFLUENCE OF NEWSPAPER ENDORSEMENTS IN U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS (2016)
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:cte:werepe:we1416

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ana Poveda ().