Television and Political Persuasion in Young Democracies: Evidence from Russia

Governments control media in much of the developing world. Does this have an effect on political choices of voters? We address this question using exogenous variation in the availability of the signal of the only independent from the government national TV channel in Russia during the 1999 parliamentary elections. We find that the presence of an independent source of political news on TV significantly decreased the vote in favor of the government party and increased the vote in favor of the opposition parties. We find that the difference in TV coverage significantly changed voting behavior even controlling for voters’ inclinations just one month prior to the elections. The effects we find are larger than those found in established democracies. ∗ Authors are from Harvard University, Harvard University, and the New Economic School, respectively. We are very grateful to Maxim Boycko and the Video International company for sharing data on the NTV coverage and to Timothy Colton for his generosity in sharing his survey data with us.