The Political Economy of Mass Media

TLDR: A survey of the literature on the influence of mass media on politics and policy is presented in this paper, which is organized along four main themes: transparency, capture, informative coverage, and ideological bias.

Abstract: We review the burgeoning political economy literature on the influence of mass media on politics and policy. This survey, which covers both theory and empirics, is organized along four main themes: transparency, capture, informative coverage, and ideological bias. We distill some general lessons and identify some open questions. 1I ntroduction Over the last decade, a sizeable number of economists have begun to study the behavior and political effects of mass media. In this survey, we propose a way of organizing this body of research, we attempt to summarize the key insights that have been learnt so far, and we suggest some potentially important open questions. We have structured the discussion into sections covering background, transparency, capture, informative coverage and ideological bias. We begin in Section 2 with a brief overview of how economics and other disciplines have approached this field and define the scope of this survey. In Section 3, we discuss the benefits and costs of transparency in politics: under what situations do voters benefit from receiving more information? In Section 4 we will ask under what conditions the government will prevent the media from performing their information provision task. Media capture is a present or latent risk in most developing countries and many developed ones. We will present a theory of endogenous capture and survey the growing empirical literature on the extent and determinants