The Impact of Mass Media On Voting Behavior: The Cross-Country Evidence

In this study, we challenge the topic of vote turnout by exploring original surveys in three north African countries: Algeria, Libya and Tunisia. We test the impact of media consumption on individual intention to vote. The existing literature argues that media could stimulate political participation, however, the empirical evidence still scarce, especially in the aforementioned countries. The use of BBC Media Action surveys provides the opportunity to fill this research gap. Separately in each country we verify the role of media consumption in the intention to vote using logistic regressions. To make the results more robust, we add to our regressions a set of socio-demographic control variables. Our findings clearly show that media consumption increases the intention to vote. Furthermore, we confirm that age, education and location are significant predictors of the likelihood to vote in the studied societies. We believe these results have a practical meaning in term of policy making.