Suchergebnisse

The television channel TV3 has played a controversial role in the Catalan politics since its creation in the early eighties for its alleged partisan bias and support for the Catalan secessionist movement. This paper examines the impact on electoral results stemming from the exposure to TV3 exploiting its staggered expansion across Catalan municipalities in the 1980s. We find that the introduction of TV3 increased voter turnout in the 1984 Catalan parliamentary election, but it did not have a significant impact on the share of votes received by Convergència i Unió, the Catalan nationalist force that has been commonly associated with this channel since its foundation.

To what extent can be electoral results in Catalonia explained by the exposure of individuals to television? This paper sheds light on this question by looking into the effect of TV3 on two distinguished political outcomes in the 1984 Catalan Parliamentary election. The outcomes of interest are voter turnout and the vote share of Convergència i Unió (CiU), one of the strongest political forces in Catalonia who has mainly driven the channel since its creation. We resort to a natural experiment based on the geographically differentiated expansion of TV3 in Catalonia. Using a Difference-in-Differences Kernel matching method, we found that the introduction of TV3 caused an increase both in the voter turnout and the CiU vote share in the 1984 Catalan parliamentary elections.