The Judge, the Politician, and the Press: Newspaper Coverage and Criminal Sentencing across Electoral Systems | Zendy

Claire Lim | Zendy; James M. Snyder | Zendy; David Strömberg | Zendy

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The Judge, the Politician, and the Press: Newspaper Coverage and Criminal Sentencing across Electoral Systems

Author(s) -

Claire Lim,

James M. Snyder,

David Strömberg

Publication year - 2015

Publication title -

american economic journal applied economics

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 12.996

H-Index - 82

eISSN - 1945-7782

pISSN - 1945-7790

DOI - 10.1257/app.20140111

Subject(s) - newspaper , political science , accountability , politics , sentence , media coverage , state (computer science) , law , criminology , sociology , media studies , philosophy , linguistics , algorithm , computer science

We study how media environments interact with political institutions that structure the accountability of public officials. Specifically, we quantify media influence on the behavior of US state court judges. We analyze around 1.5 million criminal sentencing decisions from 1986 to 2006 and new data on the newspaper coverage of 9,828 trial court judges. Since newspaper coverage is endogenous, we use the match between newspaper markets and judicial districts to identify effects. We find that newspaper coverage significantly increases sentence length by nonpartisan elected judges for violent crimes. For partisan elected and appointed judges, there are no significant effects. (JEL D72, H76, K41, L82)

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