Television News and Political Partisanship in Latin America

This article explores the linkages between television news and the decline of partisanship in Latin America, using survey data for eight countries. After discussing the erosion of traditional Latin American parties during the 1990s, I show that the literature has assumed different types of causal links between television and party dealignment (treatment vs. strategic effects, and cohort vs. short-term effects). Based on comparative research on industrial and new democracies, I present two contrasting hypotheses (television news inhibits partisanship; exposure to television creates political awareness) and test the impact of short-term treatment effects using a multinomial logit model. The results suggest that television news encourages party identification in the short run (through treatment effects), although the development of television may weaken Latin Amer-ican parties in the long run (through strategic effects). In recent years, students of Latin American politics have shown a growing interest in the political role of television. Different authors have claimed that press organizations and media technologies have become increasingly powerful and that they are weakening or replacing traditional political institutions. Main-waring and Scully (1995: 471), for instance, suggested that "television has enabled candidates to make direct appeals to large parts of the population, potentially displacing party organizations as the primary means of getting the message out to voters. " Other authors have even claimed that "the broadcast media are more powerful than the political parties " (Zuleta Puceiro 1993: 61). This article presents results of tests to determine whether or not increasing exposure to television news is related to the erosion of political partisanship among citizens of eight Latin American countries. Until very recently, the paucity of comparative data on exposure to TV news and partisanship prevented the development of cross-national empirical studies on this topic. The availability of NOTE: Replication datasets for this study are available upon request (asp27@pitt.edu). I am indebte