Television and voting in Catalonia

• Iván Mauricio Durán ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

     Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

     Barcelona, España

     
• Localización: Working papers (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Economia Aplicada), Nº. 3 (Gener 2016), 2016
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • To what extent can be electoral results in Catalonia explained by the exposure of individuals to television? This paper sheds light on this question by looking into the effect of TV3 on two distinguished political outcomes in the 1984 Catalan Parliamentary election. The outcomes of interest are voter turnout and the vote share of Convergència i Unió (CiU), one of the strongest political forces in Catalonia who has mainly driven the channel since its creation. We resort to a natural experiment based on the geographically differentiated expansion of TV3 in Catalonia. Using a Difference-in-Differences Kernel matching method, we found that the introduction of TV3 caused an increase both in the voter turnout and the CiU vote share in the 1984 Catalan parliamentary elections.