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Public Choice (2007) 131:6581 DOI 10.1007/s11127-006-9105-1
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Ascensin Andina-Daz
Received: 17 December 2004 / Accepted: 25 September 2006
C Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2006Abstract The aim of this paper is to analyze competition between two ideological media outlets that want to inuence their viewers so as to boot the number of votes for their preferred political party. We consider two ways of inuencing viewers, which correspond to two prominent theories borrowed from the literature on Sociology: the Reinforcement Approach and the Attitudinal Orientations Approach. Our ndings show that the aim of inuencing viewers generally pushes media outlets to differentiate their opinions, and that the extend of this differentiation deeply depends on the viewers behavior. More precisely, we observe that if the viewers channel hop, media outlets end up differentiating their opinions more than if the viewers receive all their information from just one media.
Keywords Ideological media . Inuence . Channel hopping
JEL Classications: D21, L82
In democracies worldwide, television is slowly but surely changing the nature of electioneering and perhaps even the distribution of power within parties.
Gunther and Mughan (2000)
1 Introduction
It is universally accepted that mass media hold great power, as they transmit information to the public and are free to highlight certain news items and ignore others, setting the agenda of public life and creating consensus or disagreement on certain issues.
This tremendous inuence of the media on public opinion has been extensively analyzed in many Social Sciences, but has so far been almost ignored in Economic literature. Sociology and Communication Theory, however, have long focused on the mass media inuence for
A. Andina-Daz
Departamento de Fundamentos del Anlisis Econmico, Universidad de Murcia, Spain e-mail: [email protected]
Springer
Reinforcement vs. change: The political inuence of the media
66 Public Choice (2007) 131:6581
almost a century. The rst studies on this topic were published in early decades of the 20th Century and may all be characterized by their common belief in the great inuence exerted by the media on public opinion. Lasswell (1927) consider mass media as a tool for manipulation and argued: Propaganda is one of the most powerful instrumentalities in the modern world. This thought, which was quite predominant at the beginning of the last Century, nally...