Panem et circenses

Removing political news to generate electoral support, evidence from Berlusconi's Italy

Bibliographic Data

ID6276973
AuthorsAndrea De Angelis (0000-0001-6866-6683, University of Zurich, corresponding author), Alessandro Vecchiato (0009-0001-0320-9032, Stanford University)
Year2024
Volume54
Issue2
Pages119-137
Publication date2024-07-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueItalian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0048-8402 • E-ISSN: 2057-4908
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/ipo.2023.32
OpenAlexW4391569387
LanguageEN
References cited42

This paper examines the strategic use of public news media – specifically television (TV) – as an instrument of political influence, focusing on Italy's 2011 financial crisis under Berlusconi's premiership. Using an original large corpus of over 20,000 hours of televised news transcripts and a quasi-experimental design, we investigate how political influence altered media coverage and, subsequently, public opinion and electoral outcomes. Our difference-in-differences analysis, complemented by unsupervised text scaling of news content, reveals a significant shift from “hard” political news to “soft” news on public TV during Berlusconi's tenure. Findings suggest a deliberate reduction in hard news coverage by an average of 107 seconds daily, which significantly increased voter support for Berlusconi's party. In the conclusions, we discuss the broader implications of our findings for media independence in Western democracies amid the emergence of artificial intelligence-generated news contents and the prevalence of algorithmically tailored news feeds

Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Media Influence and Politics · Media Studies and Communication · Populism, Right-Wing Movements

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