Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia

How do media affect voting behavior? What difference can an independent media outlet make in a country with state-controlled media? Our paper addresses these questions by comparing electoral outcomes and votes reported by survey respondents during the 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia for those geographical areas that had access and those that had no access to the only national TV channel independent from the government (“NTV”). The effect is identified from exogenous variation in the availability of the signal, which appears to be mostly idiosyncratic, conditional on controls. The findings are as follows. 1) The presence of the independent TV channel decreased the aggregate vote for the government party by 2.5 percentage points and increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 2.1 percentage points. 2) The probability of voting for opposition parties increased for individuals who watched NTV even controlling for voting intentions measured one month prior to the elections. 3) NTV had a smaller effect on votes of people with higher political knowledge and those using alternative sources of political news and a larger effect on retired persons who watch TV substantially more than working individuals. ∗ Authors are from the New Economic School. We are very grateful to Maxim Boycko and the Video International Company for sharing data on the NTV coverage and to Timothy Colton for sharing his survey data with us. We thank Alberto Alesina, Robert Bates, Tim Colton, Stefano DellaVigna, Irena Grosfeld, Ethan Kaplan, Chappell Lawson, Gabriel Lenz, Jim Robinson, Claudia Senik, Andrei Shleifer, Jim Snyder, David Strömberg, and seminar participants at the IIES at the University of Stockholm, New Economic School, Harvard University, MIT, Paris School of Economics, Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies, participants of the American Political Science Association Meeting and the Workshop on Media Economics at Zurich for helpful comments.