Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia

Enikolopov, Ruben; Petrova, Maria; Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina

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Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia

American Economic Review

54 Pages Posted: 23 Mar 2009 Last revised: 20 Sep 2023

See all articles by Ruben Enikolopov

Ruben Enikolopov

New Economic School; Institute of Political Economy and Governance; ICREA; Universitat Pompeu Fabra; Barcelona GSE

Maria Petrova

Institute for Political Economy and Governance, Barcelona; Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF); Barcelona School of Economics; Catalan Institution of Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA)

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

Paris School of Economics (PSE)

There are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: August 28, 2010

Abstract

This paper compares electoral outcomes of the 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia among geographical areas with differential access to the only independent from the government national TV channel. It was available to three-quarters of Russia’s population and its signal availability was idiosyncratic conditional on observables. Independent TV decreased aggregate vote for the government party by 8.9 percentage points, increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 6.3 percentage points, and decreased turnout by 3.8 percentage points. The probability of voting for opposition parties increased for individuals who watched independent TV even controlling for voting intentions measured one month before elections.

Keywords: Mass Media, Persuasion, Voting

JEL Classification: J0, D0, H0

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Enikolopov, Ruben and Enikolopov, Ruben and Petrova, Maria and Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina, Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia (August 28, 2010). American Economic Review, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1367046