AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP
Abstract: How important is information availability for accountability in primary elections? In primaries, candidates share a party with voters, spend less on campaigning and generally receive local, rather than national, media attention generating less information for voters to use. This paper uses the dramatic collapse of the local newspaper industry to test how a change in information has impacted every aspect of House primary elections in the United States, particularly the incumbency advantage and the ideology of nominated candidates. Using within district variation in local newspaper availability combined with novel measures of local news at the county level, this paper shows that more local news is associated with larger incumbency advantages in primaries as voters are able to learn about their representative. Additionally, using cross-sectional variation between districts this paper demonstrates suggestive evidence that local information is associated with more moderate nominees.
Mackenzie Lockhart is a postdoctoral associate at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. His research focuses on questions of elections and representation in American politics, particularly the connection between public opinion, elections, and representation. Mackenzie holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of California San Diego and his work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Political Analysis.
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