Newspaper Endorsements, Candidate Quality, and Election Outcomes in the United States

Abstract

The quality of political candidates is an important aspect of the overall quality of representation. The quality of elected officials matters because higher quality representatives, legislators, and leaders produce a more efficient and valuable government for citizens. Empirically, however, it is hard to quantify the importance of candidate quality and its effects on governing performance because candidate quality itself is difficult to measure.

In the first paper of this dissertation, I construct new measures of candidate quality and media slant using political endorsements made by local newspapers. Similar to expert judgments, newspaper endorsements of candidates reflect differences in candidate quality, once accounting for the partisan preferences of the papers. I use a newly collected data set of over 22,000 local newspaper endorsements to show that commonly used measures of candidate quality predict newspaper endorsement decisions. I simultaneously estimate a dynamic measure of the partisan slant of hundreds of local newspapers across the United States along with the quality differences between candidates in thousands of elections throughout 1950-2022. I validate both the partisan slant and quality measures using a variety of quantitative evidence, and argue that these measures have strong potential to help advance our understanding of the effects of media bias and candidate quality in the political system.

In the second paper, I use the new endorsement-based measure to provide a quantitative analysis of the effects of candidate quality on election outcomes. I distinguish between the phenomena of candidate quality effects and direct incumbency advantages, and examine how the importance of each has changed over time with the rise of political polarization. I find that higher quality candidates win a large majority of elections, with a one standard deviation increase in relative candidate quality increasing a candidate's vote share by about 4 percentage points. I estimate that candidate quality explains about one-third of incumbency effects, and that incumbency status explains only about one-fourth of candidate quality effects. While incumbency effects peaked in the late 1980s and slowly declined since, I show that quality effects gradually increased until around 2010 despite significant polarization, but then experienced a sharp decline over the past decade. I also show that the decrease in competitive elections over time -- and particularly after the 2010 redistricting cycle -- has dramatically reduced the share of elections where candidate quality effects can plausibly alter an election's outcome. The results highlight the importance of electoral competition in enabling voters to select high-quality representatives.

In the third and final paper, I investigate the direct effects of newspapers' political endorsements on election results. I focus my analysis on county-level vote shares in statewide elections for Governor and U.S. Senate, where voters across the state participate in the same election but are ``treated'' with different local newspaper exposure. I find that credible endorsements have a small but statistically significant effect on vote shares, even when controlling for newspaper bias, candidate quality differences, and expected electoral performance in each county. I also demonstrate that candidate quality \textit{per se} can explain about three-fourths of the raw correlation between newspaper endorsements and electoral performance. In aggregate, I find that endorsement effects only change election outcomes in a small subset of very close elections, but in those cases endorsements almost always help the higher quality candidate win. The results suggest that at least some voters rely on newspaper endorsements to inform their perceptions of candidate quality.

Overall, the papers in this dissertation contribute to political scientists' understanding of the significance of candidate quality in the electoral process, and underscore the crucial role played by local newspapers in improving political outcomes in the United States.