Media Coverage and Political Accountability: Theory and Evidence

This paper investigates how informative media affect political accountability and policy. I first present a baseline model of how informative media affects political accountability. The model is used to discuss the welfare consequences of private provision of news. It shows how media regulation and public broadcasting may correct market failures, notably, the under-provision of news. The model also supplies an array of testable implications, used to organize the existing empirical work. The key empirical questions are: what drives media coverage of politics; how does this coverage influence the information levels and voting behavior of the public; the the actions and selection of politicians; and government policy?