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8 October 2008

Information and accountability -- Snyder and Stromberg

Jim Snyder and David Stromberg have produced a very interesting working paper called "Press Coverage and Political Accountability." It's a big paper and I haven't processed the whole thing, but I think it is an important and clever paper that speaks to big issues about the media and democratic accountability.

The goal of the paper is to trace the cycle of political accountability: politicians go about their jobs, the media reports on the politicians, voters consume the news and become informed about the politicians, and politicians shape their behavior to respond to or anticipate pressure from voters. It is a difficult thing to measure any of the effects implied by this cycle (e.g. how much do politicians respond to voter pressure? how much does media coverage respond to actual politician behavior? how much do voters learn from the news?) for the usual endogeneity reasons endemic in social science. It usually takes a very careful research design to say something convincing about any part of this cycle. Here, the cleverness comes in the observation that the amount of news coverage devoted to a member of Congress depends to some extent on the congruence between congressional district boundaries and media market boundaries. This congruence is high if most people in a congressional district read newspaper X, and most of paper X's readers are in that congressional district. It can be low in bigger cities, particularly cities located on state boundaries, and in areas with a lot of gerrymandering.

The innovation of the paper is to use the degree of fit between congressional districts and media markets as an exogenous source of variation in how much political news voters are exposed to. The authors look to see whether their measure of congruence is correlated with how much media coverage is devoted to the member of Congress, how much voters know about their member of Congress, and how energetic and effective members of Congress appear to be in carrying out their jobs. The correlations are surprisingly strong at each point in the cycle.

I kept expecting to see an instrumental variables regression, where congruence would serve as an instrument for, e.g., voter information in its effect on member discipline. Instead they kept providing the reduced form regression for everything, which is fine. In a sense there are more IV regressions here than you could figure out what to do with, since congruence could be thought of as an instrument in estimating any subsequent effect.

Here's the part of their abstract where they describe their findings:

Exploring the links in the causal chain of media effects -- voter information, politicians' actions and policy -- we find statistically significant and substantively important effects. Voters living in areas with less coverage of their U.S. House representative are less likely to recall their represenative's name, and less able to describe and rate them. Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies: they are less likely to stand witness before congressional hearings, to serve on constituency-oriented committees (perhaps), and to vote against the party line. Finally, this congressional behavior affects policy. Federal spending is lower in areas where there is less press coverage of the local members of congress.

Posted by Andy Eggers at October 8, 2008 10:58 PM