The Impact of Media Systems on the Making of Informed Election Outcomes

Gábor Tóka, Marina Popescu

Research output: Contribution to conference typesPaper

Abstract (may include machine translation)

This paper seeks to explore whether different organization and penetration of mass media create different chances that the electorate will successfully emulate fully informed voting behavior. In other words, we are asking if there is something in the structural characteristics of media systems that is particularly helpful or particularly detrimental for the production of a well-informed electorate that can make such choices on the basis of the inevitably limited information that the electorate can possess that truly mirror the choices that the same citizens might make if they had encyclopedic knowledge of political facts. We postulate, inter alia, that the probability of fully informed election outcomes is increased by the pluralism of the media, and the penetration of high-brow and/or commercial and/or print media and also examine the impact of press-party parallelism. The empirical analysis uses cross-national survey data from post-election studies and macro-data on politics and media systems from multiple sources, an adapted version of Bartels’ (1996) simulation method to estimate fully informed outcomes, and a novel measure of political knowledge (understood as the inverse of uncertainty) among citizens.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages37
StatePublished - 2007
EventGeneral Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research - Pisa, Italy
Duration: 6 Sep 20078 Sep 2007

Conference

ConferenceGeneral Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityPisa
Period6/09/078/09/07

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