Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior
Changes to the media environment have increased polarized voting in America through both addition and subtraction. We argue that the decline of local newspapers has contributed to the nationalization of American politics: as local newspapers close, Americans should rely more heavily on available national news or partisan heuristics to make political decisions. We assess the impact of newspaper closure on polarized voting, using genetic matching to compare counties that are statistically similar on the observables but for the loss of a local newspaper. We identify a small but significant causal decrease in split ticket voting in presidential and senatorial elections in these matched communities: in areas where a newspaper closes, split ticket voting decreases by 1.9 percent.