Does Democracy Die Because of Darkness?

• In Event: Voting, Political News and the Campaign

Abstract

In the United States, the last twenty years have seen a marked decline in newspapers’ coverage of local politics, the result of an increasingly troubling economic picture for newspapers. As coverage of local politics has fallen, so too has political participation, often precipitously. Previous research has linked the two trends, finding that in large cities, as newspapers diminish, political participation reduces. The causal connection is intuitive: with local newspapers producing less news about local government and elections, it is harder and more expensive for citizens to acquire enough information to vote. Thus, would-be voters stay home.

Unfortunately, causal inference linking declining newspaper coverage to reduced local political participation is frustrated by confounding variables that have changed over the same time period (e.g., polarization). I address those troubles by asking two questions that isolate the role of thinning newspapers in affecting local political participation. First, I ask whether local political participation has declined in places that have not had any daily newspaper coverage during the last two decades. If it has, then the decline of newspapers is likely superfluous to explanations of falling political participation. Second, I ask whether declining participations in local politics predates the decline of local papers, and if so, whether it was hastened by it.

To answer the first question, I construct an original dataset of mayoral election participation rates from 250 cities identified in the UNC News Deserts Database as having had no daily newspaper from 2004-2020. I compare mayoral election participation rates in those cities to participation rates in large cities with declining newspapers (identified by Hayes & Lawless, 2021). To answer the second question, I review mayoral election participation rates dating back to 1950 in the 100 largest US cities, identifying trends in participation before and after the onset of newspaper decline in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

Author

• Asa Royal