Effect of Media on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions in the United States
Recent studies have concluded that such media exposure can have a sizable impact in shaping the public’s political knowledge, attitudes and behavior. Media outlets can influence voters not only through the slant of a particular report, but also merely by choosing which stories to cover. The most common method of determining the effect of media content is to use survey data to measure the association between a respondent’s reported media exposure and his or her political views. But these studies suffer from upwardly biased estimates of media influence due to individuals’ tendency to seek out information that agrees with their pre-existing views. A prospective field experiment randomly introducing new media sources into peoples’ lives could overcome these biases.
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 outstanding opportunity to study the effect of media slant in a natural setting within a population who are all subject to the same outside factors, such as political events and outcomes, and have 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.
From the 3,347 households of registered voters who reported that they received neither the Post nor the Times, researchers randomly assigned households to receive a free subscription to one of the two papers for ten weeks, or to receive no paper, providing a comparison. A week after the election, a follow-up survey was administered asking individuals whether they voted in the November 2005 election, which candidate they selected or preferred, their attitudes toward news events of the previous weeks, and their knowledge about recent news events. Voter turnout data was also collected for the November 2005 and 2006 elections from state administrative records.
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. There was some evidence of increased voter turnout in the 2006 election among those receiving either paper, with a 3 percentage point increase in voting. This surprising result could be a consequence of the post-election exposure to the remainder of the ten week newspaper subscriptions, or the fact that 17% of treatment households renewed their subscription after the free period ended.
Impact on Political Preference: Interestingly, receiving either newspaper led to an increase of support for the Democratic candidate. Despite the political slant of the newspapers, the effects were similar for the Post and the Times, resulting in an overall 7 percentage point increase in likelihood of voting for the Democratic candidate. Despite the small sample size, this result is significant. The effect could be due to the fact that the Republican President’s approval ratings were falling over that period of time, or the possibility that the Democratic candidate was conservative leaning. In either case, these results suggest that the informational effect of more exposure to news was stronger than the effect of its slant.
