The Persuasive Power of the Fourth Estate: Estimating the Effect of Newspaper Endorsements: 1960-1980

This paper estimates the persuasive effect of newspaper presidential endorsements on its readers over five elections (1960-1980), a period when the vast majority of newspaper endorsements were for the Republican candidate. I find that newspaper endorsements caused a large, significant change in readers’ preferred candidate and Republican endorsements, despite being more common, were at least as effective as Democratic endorsements. Because my empirical strategy allows me to estimate causal effects for a large sample of U.S. newspapers in each election year, I can calculate the cumulative effect of newspaper endorsements. I estimate that over the 5 elections covered in my sample, U.S. newspapers shifted more than 17 million voters toward Republican candidates.