The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV

By Ruben Durante, P. Pinotti, Andrea Tesei. The American Economic Review, 2019

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the political impact of commercial television in Italy exploiting the staggered introduction of Berlusconi’s private TV network, Mediaset, in the early 1980s. We find that individuals with early access to Mediaset all-entertainment content were more likely to vote for Berlusconi’s party in 1994, when he first ran for office. The effect persists for five elections and is driven by heavy TV viewers, namely the very young and the elderly. Regarding possible mechanisms, we find that individuals exposed to entertainment TV as children were less cognitively sophisticated and civic-minded as adults, and ultimately more vulnerable to Berlusconi’s populist rhetoric. (JEL D72, L82, M31, Z13)

Subfields: Communication, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20c6b5d5bcbccbda453b6f152f9b8e75bdb5e1d6

Citations in the corpus

• Internet and Politics: Evidence from U.K. Local Elections and Local Government Policies (2015, unknown): “…Prat and Strömberg (2005), Snyder and Strömberg (2010), Enikolopov, Petrova, and Zhuravskaya (2011), Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson (2011), Drago, Nannicini, and Sobbrio (2014), and Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei (2015), among others, investigate how different media affect voters’ behavior.”