IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/31468.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Electric Telegraph, News Coverage and Political Participation

Author

Listed:
  • Tianyi Wang

Abstract

Using newly digitized data on the growth of the telegraph network in America during 1840-1852, the paper studies the impacts of the electric telegraph on national elections. I use proximity to daily newspapers with telegraphic connections to Washington to generate plausibly exogenous variation in access to telegraphed news from Washington. I find that access to Washington news with less delay had a robust positive effect on voter turnout in national elections. For mechanisms, I provide evidence that newspapers facilitated the dissemination of national news to local areas. In addition, text analysis on more than a hundred small-town weekly newspapers from the 1840s shows that the improved access to news from Washington led newspapers to cover more national political news, including coverage of Congress, the presidency, and sectional divisions involving slavery. The results suggest that the telegraph made newspapers less parochial, facilitated a national conversation and increased political participation. I find little evidence that access to telegraphed news from Washington affected party vote shares or Congressmen's roll call votes.

Suggested Citation

  • Tianyi Wang, 2023. "The Electric Telegraph, News Coverage and Political Participation," NBER Working Papers 31468, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31468
    Note: DAE POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w31468.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mathias Bühler & Andrew Dickens & Andrew C. Dickens, 2024. "From Couch to Poll: Media Content and the Value of Local Information," CESifo Working Paper Series 10959, CESifo.
    2. Bühler Mathias & Andrew Dickens, 2024. "From Couch to Poll: Media Content and The Value of Local Information," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 496, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media
    • L96 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Telecommunications
    • N41 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
    • N71 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
    • O3 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31468. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.