News Nationalization and Representation: Evidence from Local Campaign Finance

• In Event: Information Flows and Policy Priorities in Local Elections

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the American media landscape has changed dramatically as local news stations have been purchased by national conglomerates and as local newspapers have shut down. Past evidence has shown that local news has consequently become more nationalized and conservative (Martin and McCrain 2019), that a lack of local news caused voters to become more polarized (Darr, Hitt, and Dunaway 2018; Moskowitz 2021), and that local newspaper closures are associated higher borrowing among municipal governments (Gao, Lee, and Murphy 2020). By using a combination of campaign finance data for state legislative race as well as a new dataset on municipal campaign finance, this paper asks whether changes to local TV news stations and newspapers affect the interplay in between the electorate and political candidates in American cities. First, I ask whether donations to local and state races change when a city loses its local news source. Does the volume of donations change, shifting to a more elite donor pool, as the cost of keeping up with local news increases? Do donors become more localized, as out-of-city same-media-market residents (for example a Gary resident in the Chicago DMA) gain less city exposure? Finally, I utilize individual-level campaign finance data (Bonica 2019 for state and federal campaign finance data as well as my new municipal campaign contributions dataset) and election returns to ask whether the changing media landscape has implications for ideological representation. By utilizing bridge observations who both contribute to municipal races and have DIME CF Scores, I compute common-space ideology scores for municipal candidates that can be analyzed alongside existing CF Scores for state and federal candidates. With this data, I examine the following questions: Are state and local candidates becoming increasingly partisan? Are residents increasingly donating to more partisan national candidates? Does the electorate become worse at selecting an ideological match in primary and general elections?

Author

• Chenoa Yorgason, Stanford University