Independent Media and Elections
Presented by:
Nikita Zakharov
Department of Economics
University of Freiburg
Thursday, October 15, 2020
3:45 pm-5:00 pm
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Does independent media undermine the support of an autocratic regime? To answer this question, we carry out two field experiments during the Russian parliamentary elections in 2016 by promoting access to an online independent news-channel, TV Rain. In the first experiment, we randomly select the population of 15 cities to receive a free- trial access option and advertise it on the Russian social network. We show that our treatment increases the consumption of TV Rain in the selected cities and not in a control group, but it does not affect the voting for the incumbent party. Instead, we find that advertising the independent media leads to an increase in voting for the ruling party in electoral districts with relatively high support for the regime, and this effect declines and becomes negative with the decrease in the regime support. We test this result in the second experiment, where we randomly distribute access to the TV Rain during a telephone survey two weeks before the election. After the election, we carry out a second wave of the telephone survey and ask respondents about their voting choices. We find a similar nonlinear effect, but only among the respondents receiving the news from the social networks: our treatment decreases the likelihood to vote for the ruling party among respondents with the lowest level of government approval and increases it among respondents with the highest approval level. Respondents who do not receive the news from the social networks voted less often for the ruling party when treated with the TV Rain offer if they did not approve the regime. Our findings suggest that the promotion of independent media in an authoritarian regime does not always undermine its public support and can trigger an opposite reaction among its core supporter, making them politically more active.