Ruben Durante, Paolo Pinotti and Andrea Tesei present evidence that earlier exposure to commercial TV is associated with a substantial decline in social capital consistent with the diffusion of a culture of individualism and civic disengagement that characterized Mediaset programs and which favored Berlusconi’s political message.
Can news-free media influence political behavior? We investigate this issue in the context of Italy exploiting differences across municipalities in the early availability of Silvio Berlusconi’s private TV network, Mediaset, due to its staggered introduction over the national territory and to idiosyncratic geomorphological factors. We find that municipalities exposed to Mediaset prior to 1985 exhibit greater electoral support for Berlusconi’s party when he first ran for office in 1994, relative to municipalities that were exposed only later on. This effect, quantified between 1 and 2 percentage points, tends to persist in following elections and is very significant and robust to several specifications and falsification tests. This effect can hardly be explained by differential exposure to partisan bias in the news, since news programs on Mediaset channels were introduced only in 1991, when these were already available to the entire population. Instead, we present evidence that earlier exposure to commercial TV is associated with a substantial decline in social capital consistent with the diffusion of a culture of individualism and civic disengagement that characterized Mediaset programs and which favored Berlusconi’s political message.