Do Newspapers Benefit Incumbents?

Abstract

Theories claim that news coverage is an important source of incumbency advantage, yet empirical evidence to support these claims is limited and inconclusive. To make progress, I exploit a unique shock to the media landscape in Denmark that occurred in the 19th century: The abolition of censorship in 1849 sparked a dramatic surge in the supply of local newspapers. I collect a new dataset on the more than 6500 candidates who ran for a parliamentary seat from 1849 to 1915, and I link it to constituency-level information on the complete universe of local Danish newspapers, as well as candidate-level information on coverage obtained from a database of several million scanned newspaper pages. I use a regression-discontinuity design to identify the incumbency advantage, and I exploit changes in local media markets to determine if this advantage is linked to emerging markets for local newspapers. The results indicate that incumbents enjoy privileged access to press coverage and that the electoral incumbency advantage more than doubles in the presence of local newspapers. The effect is more pronounced when said newspapers are politically connected to the party of the incumbent.