📰 What This Study Asks

Would state legislatures function differently if voters had access to more information about legislative politics? This article traces how variation in local newspaper coverage shapes voter behavior, election outcomes, and legislative behavior in statehouses.

🧭 How Press Coverage Was Measured and Identified

• Leverages the haphazard overlap of newspaper markets and legislative districts to generate plausibly exogenous variation in coverage.
• Constructs and validates a measure of legislative press coverage for all 49 partisan state legislatures during 2000–2022.
• The coverage measure is shown to be plausibly uncorrelated with other district-level variables, supporting causal interpretation.
• Assembles a large-scale dataset to follow effects from media exposure to voters, elections, and representation.

🔍 Key Findings

• Robust local press coverage substantially augments down-ballot voter engagement.
• Stronger coverage increases the electoral return to ideological moderation, making moderation more electorally rewarded.
• Local press presence also enlarges the incumbency advantage.
• Once in office, legislators who receive stronger press coverage do more constituency work and deviate less from their district’s median voter.

⚖️ Why It Matters

These results suggest that stronger local press coverage would make state legislators more moderate, more representative of their districts, and more productive, with implications for accountability and democratic responsiveness at the state level.