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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability And Corruption: Evidence From Us States, Filipe R. Campante, Quoc-Anh Do May 2012

Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability And Corruption: Evidence From Us States, Filipe R. Campante, Quoc-Anh Do

Research Collection School Of Economics

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states. In particular, this is the case when we use the variation induced by the exogenous location of a state’s centroid to instrument for the concentration of population around the capital city. We then show that different mechanisms for holding state politicians accountable are also affected by the spatial distribution of population: newspapers provide greater coverage of state politics when their audiences are more concentrated around the capital, and voter turnout in state elections is greater in places that are closer to the capital. …


Media Persuasion And Voter Welfare, Saptarshi P. Ghosh, Jaideep Roy, Peter Postl Jan 2012

Media Persuasion And Voter Welfare, Saptarshi P. Ghosh, Jaideep Roy, Peter Postl

Saptarshi P Ghosh

We study information transmission where an informed media, whose interests are partially in conflict with a finite group of rational voters, transmits news items in an attempt to manipulate democratic decisions. In a common-interest two-alternative voting model where due to reputation concerns the media can credibly commit to send any news reliably, we show that even if voters welcome the news when it arrives, media's presence can hurt their ex-ante welfare in both large and small constituencies.