Essays About Newspaper Political Endorsements

My dissertation focuses on empirically investigating two aspects of newspaper endorsements: their influence on elections, and the factors determining these recommendations. In the first chapter of my dissertation, "Newspaper Political Endorsements and Market Competition," I develop and estimate a simple structural model to identify the factors determining endorsements. I consider an environment where newspapers are characterized by a political orientation and only make well-informed endorsements. I use this framework to investigate the relationship between newspaper endorsements and market competition. The model also predicts how market competition might affect newspapers' partisan behavior, and whether and to what extent competition makes partisan papers endorsement behavior resemble that of non-partisan papers. In the second chapter of my dissertation, "The Tuesday Advantage of Candidates Endorsed by American Newspapers," I document the electoral advantage of candidates who have a newspaper endorsement published on Election Day in comparison to other endorsed candidates. I provide evidence that this advantage is not driven by a selection effect, suggesting that it is instead explained by readers deciding how to vote based on endorsements read on Election Day. This chapter's results imply both a causal effect of newspaper political endorsements on voting outcomes, and that the endorsement publication date determines the effectiveness of this advice.

Author dc:creator

• Leite, Lopez

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1813/17110

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ecommons.cornell.edu:1813/17110