Voting Behavior, Newspapers, and Language

This paper investigates how newspaper consumption a ects political engagement. To circumvent potential endogeneity issues, I use variation in European languages as an instrument for newspaper consumption. Speci cally, I consider variation in how much physical space languages require to express some given information content. I rst estimate such language e ciency from large bilingual text compilations. Using a European-wide survey that spans 18 di erent languages, I nd that respondents who speak e cient languages are more likely to read newspapers, as is consistent with this mechanism. This nding is robust to a large variety of alternative speci cations. Using language e ciency as an instrument for newspaper consumption, I nd that newspaper consumption increases turnout and political interest of immigrants. (JEL Codes: D22, L82)