Local Newspaper Decline and Political Polarization - Evidence from a Multi-Party Setting

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

How does the decline of traditional news outlets affect political polarization? We provide novel evidence on this question by examining the link between local newspaper exits, media consumption, and ultimately electoral behavior in a multi-party setting. Our empirical analysis combines a unique panel of all German local newspapers between 1980 and 2009, electoral returns, and an annual media consumption survey of more than 670,000 respondents. Using a difference-in-differences design, we demonstrate that local newspaper exits causally increase electoral polarization. In addition, we show that local news exits increase individual-level politicization and partisanship. Further analyses point to changes in media consumption as the underlying mechanism driving this result: following local news exits, consumers substitute local news with national tabloid news. Our findings have implications for scholarship on the nationalization of news, and shed new light on the causal chain running from changing local news landscapes to electoral behavior.