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 during the peak of U.S. newspaper circulation (1960-1980), during which time 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 even Republican endorsements, despite being more common, were eﬀective. 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 U.S. newspapers shifted more than 20 million voters toward Republican candidates.