Some are more equal.

How much you know about your congressional candidates depends on where you live. U.S. congressional districts vary greatly in the degree to which their boundaries match those of current media markets. If the boundaries of the district and the television market's Area of Dominant Influence match, people know more about candidates. Past measures of district/market congruency are inadequate. I use two existing measures and one new measure of district/market congruency to demonstrate that each measures something different. The two old measures are congruency and market dominance. Congruency measures how well the local media cover congressional candidates and how useful the candidate's advertising is in communicating to voters. Market dominance measures the degree to which one or two television markets dominate the district. My new measure, district dominance, measures the degree to which the district dominates the television markets that serve it. Each of these measures tells us something different about what voters know about their candidates. But we need to develop new measures, because I show in a qualitative analysis of six congressional districts, that the television market is not the same as the radio market or newspaper market. Each has different boundaries. All three district/market congruency measures look only at the television market boundaries. I use Federal Election Commission data to see how the campaign strategy differs in different districts. I use American National Election Studies to see if citizens recall the names of congressional candidates, like or dislike those candidates or see, hear or read about those candidates. Television market/district mismatch do not the same effect in presidential election years and off-year elections. Media market fit also has a different effect on incumbents and challengers. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that the impact of media market fit cannot be adequately assessed unless the mismatch between the market reach of each medium is factored into the measures used.PhDCommunication and the ArtsMass communicationPolitical scienceSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132502/2/9963924.pd