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Media Influence on Vote Choices: Unemployment News and Incumbents' Electoral Prospects
Author(s) -
Garz Marcel,
Martin Gregory J.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/ajps.12539
Subject(s) - milestone , unemployment , voting , governor , economics , regression discontinuity design , labour economics , demographic economics , political science , macroeconomics , engineering , law , medicine , history , archaeology , pathology , politics , aerospace engineering
How does news about the economy influence voting decisions? We isolate the effect of the information environment from the effect of change in the underlying economic conditions themselves by taking advantage of left‐digit bias. We show that unemployment figures crossing a round‐number “milestone” cause a discontinuous increase in the amount of media coverage devoted to unemployment conditions, and we use this discontinuity to estimate the effect of attention to unemployment news on voting, holding constant the actual economic conditions on the ground. Milestone effects on incumbent U.S. governor vote shares are large and notably asymmetric: Bad milestone events hurt roughly twice as much as good milestone events help.