Effect of Media on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions in the United StatesPDF version
Citizens learn about politics and government primarily from television and newspapers. These media outlets can influence voters not only through the slant of a particular report, but also merely by choosing which to stories to cover. Recent studies suggest that media exposure can have a sizable impact in shaping the public’s political knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. However, these studies may have overestimated the impacts of media influence due to individuals’ tendency to seek out information that agrees with their pre-existing views.
Prince William County in northeastern Virginia lies just 25 miles from Washington D.C. Here, the population is far enough away from the nation’s capitol so as not to be dominated by citizens involved professionally with politics, but close enough to be within the circulation of Washington’s conservative and liberal newspapers. The Washington D.C. metro area is served by two major newspapers, the conservative Washington Times and the more liberal Washington Post. The presence of a liberal and conservative paper serving the same region creates an opportunity to study the effect of media slant in a natural setting within a single population, which is subject to the same outside factors, such as political events and outcomes, and has a range of political leanings.
This study takes advantage of this natural setting to measure the effect of political news content on people’s political behavior and opinions. Approximately one month prior to the Virginia gubernatorial election in November 2005, researchers administered a short survey to a random selection of households in Prince William County.
Impact on Political Knowledge: Receiving either paper produced no effect on knowledge of political events or stated opinions about those events, and there were no differences between the treatment and comparison groups in voter turnout for the 2005 gubernatorial election. In November 2006, however, there was a 2.8 percentage point increase in voter turnout. It is surprising to see a result in 2006 but not in 2005. This could be a result of the post-election exposure to the remainder of the ten-week newspaper subscriptions, or the fact that 17 percent of the treatment group renewed their subscription after the free period ended.
