Who Cleans Up When the Party's Over? The Decline of Partisan Media and Rise of Split-Ticket Voting in the 20th Century

Abstract

While scholars have studied the composition and impact of the partisan press during their 19th-century height, the political impact of the gradual decline of these partisan papers remains relatively under-examined. The unnoted vitality and endurance of partisan newspapers (which continued to constitute a majority of American newspapers until the 1960s) represents a huge hole in our understanding of partisan communication in the post-war era. As a consequence of this omission, scholars have ignored a potentially vital contributing factor to changing patterns of partisan voting.

This paper sets out to examine this relationship by constructing a quadrennial database of newspaper party self-identification from 1932 to the 2004 for 66 key counties across the country. We then match these data to county-level presidential and congressional vote totals. Based on these data, we describe the decline of explicitly partisan newspapers over time and find evidence that the rise of non-partisan news helps explain the rise of ticket-splitting and decline of consistent partisan voting.

Keywords: Newspapers, Congressional elections, split-ticket voting,