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Measuring the Partisan Behavior of U.S. Newspapers, 1880 to 1980

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2024

Shigeo Hirano  and
James M. Snyder Jr.
Shigeo Hirano
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science, Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street, New York, NY10027. E-mail: [email protected].
James M. Snyder Jr.*
Affiliation:
Professor of Government, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 02138, and National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.
*
E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly, we find as much change after the 1910s as before, which contributes to the existing literature that focuses on changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We also investigate words and phrases that had negative or positive partisan connotations in particular periods. Finally, we examine whether some of the common hypotheses offered in the literature can account for the changes. The initial findings suggest that these explanations can only account for part of the decline.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 84 , Issue 2 , June 2024 , pp. 554 - 592
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association

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Footnotes

We thank Michael Auslen, Sabrina Goldfischer, Matthew Kind, and Sam Throm for their excellent research assistance. We thank Eric Schickler for suggesting that we look at the Election Bill in the 1890s and David Mayhew for suggesting that we look at the Court Reform Plan in 1937. We thank Paul Rhode for generously sharing the county-level wealth data. We thank seminar and conference participants at the European University Institute, Princeton University, NYC Media Seminar, Wake Forest University Political Economy Conference, EPSA 2023 Conference, and Harvard University for their helpful comments. We also thank Julia Cagé, Matthew Gentzkow, James Hamilton, Stephen Lacy, Maria Petrova, Ricardo Puglisi, Eric Schickler, Robert Y. Shapiro, Jesse Shapiro, Kenneth Shepsle, Paul Starr, Marco Tabellini, Lynn Vavreck, Arjun Vishwanath, and Hye Young You for their helpful comments.

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