How TV News Reporting Affects Voter Decisions

PERCOCO AND GRAZIANO ANALYZE REACTIONS TO THE CHOICE OF STORIES TO BE REPORTED. MORE REPORTING ON CRIME LEADS TO AN INCREASED PROBABILITY OF RIGHTWING VOTING

The literature on the influence of media on elections has rarely examined the channels through which this influence is exercised. Paolo R. Graziano and Marco Percoco did it. In their recent Agenda setting and the political economy of fear: How crime news influences voters’ beliefs they have investigated the role played by the media in determining individual attitudes towards crime and the effect on voting of the exposure on TV news reports. The authors looked at the Italian general elections from 2001 to 2006, when the fight against crime was high in the political agenda of the centre-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. “We started with an empirical observation”, Percoco says. “While the crime rates went down in each category of offense, the perception of their importance, on the contrary, went up. We asked ourselves: can fear be used as a leverage point during an electoral competition?”.

To provide an answer, they analyzed the dataset on the presence of crime news on Italian TV provided by the Osservatorio di Pavia and the surveys of the Istituto Carlo Cattaneo. They found out that the geography of fear does not coincide with the geography of crime. “TV exposure enhanced the salience of the crime issue in voters’ minds, regardless of the crime rates near where they lived. This exposure had an effect on their decision to vote for the centre-right coalition”. A peak of crime news in the two months preceding the election pushed previous left-wing voters to choose the centre-right. “Today, it would be interesting to investigate if the salience of the immigration and the globalization issues is based on the observation of reality or fueled by TV and social media”.

Read more about this topic:
Francesco Giavazzi. Elections: How and Why a Direction Is To Be Taken
Vincenzo Galasso. Experts and loyalists are the candidates that get onto the electoral lists
Massimo Morelli. How voter turnout varies, and why
Tommaso Nannicini. How the choice of candidates changes under different electoral systems
Francesco Passarelli. The psychology of voting and protesting
Guido Tabellini. why extremist parties do not win runoff elections

by Claudio Todesco