Political Determinants of the News Market: Novel Data and Quasi-Experimental Evidence from India (with Julia Cagé and Guilhem Cassan)
Information conveyed through news media influences political behavior. But to what extent are media markets themselves shaped by political determinants? We build a novel panel dataset of newspaper markets in India from 2002 to 2017 to measure the impact of changes in electoral importance on how news markets develop over time. We exploit the announcement of an exogenous change in the boundaries of electoral constituencies to causally identify the relationship between the (future) electoral importance of news markets and the change in the number and circulation of newspapers. Using both an event-study and a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we show that markets that became more electorally important experienced a significant rise in both circulation and the number of titles per capita. Both supply and demand seem to drive the increase, but we estimate that the former explains almost all the variation in the short run and around 50% in the long run. Finally, we document how effects vary with prior levels of political competition and newspapers’ characteristics, and discuss implications for voting behavior and democratic accountability.
The Politics of Assisted Reproduction: Global Inequality and the Role of the State (with Eli Baltzersen, Catarina Barbieri, Mala Htun, and My Rafstedt)
Involuntary childlessness is a challenge across the world, but there is great global inequality in access to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). In contrast to abortion, ARTs have been significantly less politicized, and state regulation is still evolving. In this paper, we draw on both cross-national data and case studies to demonstrate the uneven access to ARTs both across and within countries, something that constitutes a serious challenge for global reproductive justice. Further, we discuss how ARTs differ from abortion and other morality politics issues in that they only challenge religious doctrine to a limited degree. Finally, we unpack ARTs as a political issue that maps onto numerous ongoing political debates. Overall, our goal is to demonstrate that the politics of ARTs affect not only the lives of individuals needing assistance to achieve parenthood but are also relevant to various contentious political topics, and therefore warrant more attention from political actors and academics alike.
Keeping women out: Incumbency and renomination patterns for female politicians in India (with Tarsha Vasu)
Whereas village-level quotas in India have brought hundreds of thousands of women to power in local politics, only 4.6% of the Members of Parliament (MPs) and 4.7% of the Members of Legislative Assemblies (MLAs) in India have been women since 1961. Using a complete, new dataset of the more than 550,000 candidates in Indian state assembly and parliamentary elections 1961-2023, including almost 30,000 female candidates, we show that female candidates tend to do as well as male candidates in the elections where they run. Controlling for differences in candidate quality by using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) of close elections between male and female candidates, we also show that parties tend to re-nominate fewer of their female than their male incumbents and runner-ups. The findings indicate that it is party bias and a hostile political environment rather than voters bias that has made the inclusion of women in Indian politics so slow.
Rape Legislation and Gendered Evaluations of Non-Consensual Sex (with Eli Baltzersen and Øyvind Skorge)
Recent years have seen a global shift from coercion-based to consent-based rape legislation. This pre-analysis plan examines how the introduction of a consent-based rape law in Norway affects gender bias in evaluating non-consensual sex. Before the law is introduced, we expect respondents to be more likely to evaluate a scenario of non-consensual sex as rape if a man is the perpetrator and a woman is the victim than if the roles are reversed. Building on expressive law theory, we hypothesize that this gender bias will be reduced after the consent-based law is adopted, and even more so among people who are made aware of its implications. We test these hypotheses using a vignette experiment of a non-consensual sexual encounter administered to representative samples of Norwegians before and after the legal change. Our findings contribute to the nascent empirical literature on the expressive power of the law.