The Influence of Biased Local Newspaper Endorsements
Presented at the 94th Annual Southern Political Science Association Meeting, January 2023. Honorable Mention for the Pi Sigma Alpha – Malcolm Jewell Award
Abstract
This paper investigates the direct effects of political endorsements on election results. I focus on analyzing county-level vote shares in statewide elections for Governor and U.S. Senate, where voters across the state participate in the same election but are "treated" with different local newspaper exposure. I find that credible endorsements have a small but statistically significant effect on vote shares of about 1.3 percentage points. I also demonstrate that county-level newspaper bias and vote shares are positively correlated, and that candidate quality per se can explain about three-fourths of the raw correlation between newspaper endorsements and electoral performance. In aggregate, endorsement effects only change election outcomes in a small subset of very close elections, but in those cases endorsements almost always help the higher quality candidate win. The results suggest that local newspapers play a role in improving political outcomes and that at least some voters may rely on newspaper endorsements to inform their perceptions of candidate quality.