The APSA Public Scholarship Program sees political science graduate students publish abstracts of new research in the American Political Science Review. Written by Dirck de Kleer, the article features a new article by Eunji Kim and Shawn Patterson Jr., “The American Audience: The Political Impact of Entertainment Media.”
Americans watch a lot of television, averaging more than four hours a day. It’s no wonder, then, that political scientists have studied the media’s impact on politics for years, from the impact of election ads on voter turnout to the role partisan media plays in polarization. But the media they study are typically explicitly political. The idea that entertainment media influences politics has often been met with skepticism; when it has been studied, it’s usually done so within the context of its substitution effects. But in their recent paper, “The American Viewer” (a title that pays homage to the classic “The American Voter”), Kim and Patterson challenge this view. They argue that entertainment media create a unique opportunity for celebrities to build personal bonds with voters. When these nonpolitical actors run for office, they can leverage these quasi-social connections to appeal to voters.
The authors focus on the rise of Donald Trump, perhaps the most visible example of the entertainment media’s influence on American politics. Prior to running for president, Trump hosted the reality TV show The Apprentice for 11 years. The show, in which participants competed for the honor of working for Trump, aired from 2003 to 2015 and drew more than 28 million viewers at its peak. It has long been a popular hypothesis among political commentators and journalists that Trump benefits from the reality TV brand. Indeed, the authors document how frequently mainstream news media mentioned The Apprentice during the 2016 election cycle.
“in the end, ‘[I]”It’s difficult to distinguish between politics and entertainment, and it’s dangerous to try to separate them.” Kim and Patterson turned to two different data sources to systematically study whether and to what extent The Apprentice increased Donald Trump’s electoral chances. First, using Twitter data, they found that about 69% of followers of the NBC Apprentice account also followed Donald Trump, compared with only 12% following Marco Rubio and 8% following Ted Cruz. Second, they analyzed a survey of white voters conducted before the 2016 presidential election. The survey revealed that frequent viewers of The Apprentice were more supportive of Trump than non-viewers. In contrast, non-viewers who supported Trump were more likely to evaluate his campaign along more typical partisan lines. Moreover, in open-ended responses, these voters mentioned Trump’s personality traits (“pretty tough,” “speaks his mind”) more frequently than those who had never watched The Apprentice.
The authors go beyond simply demonstrating correlation. In their causal inference, they exploit the fact that in the early 2000s, before the widespread use of streaming services such as Netflix, many Americans watched the same channels throughout the evening. In the 2004 television season, on Thursdays, The Apprentice (9 p.m.) aired immediately after the popular sitcoms Will & Grace and Joey at 8 p.m. In other words, some people ended up watching The Apprentice not because they had a strong attachment to the show or to Trump, but simply because they were watching a popular sitcom on NBC at 8 p.m. and did not change the channel. Using this “channel inertia,” Kim and Patterson demonstrate that entertainment media causally influenced county-level vote shares for Trump during the Republican primary. But we find no evidence of a similar effect in primaries, where no such rule of thumb exists and voters rely on other factors such as name recognition, but in general elections, where the power of partisan identity plays a much more important role.
At a time when news consumption is declining globally, this study helps us better understand how seemingly apolitical media can have such a powerful influence on our politics.[I]”It is difficult to distinguish between politics and entertainment, and it is dangerous to try to separate them.”