Has the Decline in Local News Coverage Increased the Power of Political Advertising?

• In Event: Campaigns and Elections

Abstract

Historically, most of what voters know about political candidates has come from news media. However, over the last two decades in the United States there has been a shift in the source of candidate information from news to advertising. As the number of local news outlets has declined, citizens have become increasingly reliant on political advertising for information about local political candidates. This is especially true for low salience races, such as municipal primary elections, not covered by national media. It is unclear, however, whether the decline in local news coverage increased the power of the advertising deployed by campaigns.
This question is difficult to analyze in the context of general election campaigns, given the strength of party identification and the rarity of competitive races. In New York City municipal primary elections, however, the presence of term limits and a generous public financing system instituted in 2001 have generated more than 650 city council candidate campaigns which can be examined with statistical precision. The absence of partisan cues in primary elections results in a relatively “sterile” environment for conducting an analysis of the effects of political advertising over the time-period in which the volume of local news coverage declined. This paper will use regression analysis to determine whether the decline in the volume of local news coverage has generated an increase in the size of the persuasive effects of political advertising between 2001 and 2017.

Author

• Laura Tamman, Pace University