Does Fox News Change Votes?

Does Fox news affect voting behavior? In August Alan Krueger, writing in his New York Times Economic Scene column, said:

A new study by Stefano DellaVigna ... and Ethan Kaplan ... ask[s] whether the advent of the Fox News Channel ... affected voter behavior. They found that Fox had no detectable effect on which party people voted for, or whether they voted at all. … Thus, the introduction of Fox news did not appear to have increased the percentage of people voting for the Republican presidential candidate. A similar finding emerged for Congressional and senatorial elections...

But Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling finds an updated version of the paper that comes to a different conclusion. Chris says "I find this new NBER paper depressing." Here's the abstract of the paper (an earlier version is included below for comaprison):

The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting, by Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan, March 30, 2006 Abstract Does media bias affect voting? We address this question by looking at the entry of Fox News in cable markets and its impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20 percent of US towns. Fox News availability in 2000 appears to be largely idiosyncratic. Using a data set of voting data for 9,256 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gain 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns which broadcast Fox News. The results are robust to town-level controls, district and county fixed effects, and alternative specifications. We also find a significant effect of Fox News on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican. We interpret the results in light of a simple model of voter learning about media bias and about politician quality. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for voters subject to non-rational persuasion.

Is the .4 to .7 percentage point change a big number? You be the judge. The text of the paper says:

Since Fox News in 2000 was available in about 35 percent of households, the impact of Fox News on the two-party vote share in 2000 is estimated to be 0.15 to 0.2 percentage points, 200,000 votes nation-wide. While this vote shift is small compared to the 3.5 percentage point shift in our sample between 1996 and 2000, it is still likely to have been decisive in the close presidential 2000 elections.

This brings up something I've been meaning to mention. We present a lot of cutting edge research on these sites, mostly working papers since in economics publishing lags can be in years and if you wait for articles to appear in journals, you are already several years behind. But the papers are just that, working papers. Though we try to choose papers that appear to be solid research, most have not yet been through the refereeing and publication process and it is entirely possible that results will change, sometimes dramatically, as further work is performed to refine the papers and satisfy questions that arise in seminars, the publication process, and in the author's thoughts and conversations. In the end, getting it right is the important thing.

For comparison, here's the abstract from March 10, 2005, a little over a year ago:

Abstract Does the media affect voting? We address this question by looking at the entry of Fox News in cable markets and its impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20 percent of US towns. Fox News availability in 2000 appears to be largely idiosyncratic. Using a data set of voting data for 8,634 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find no significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. We can rule out an effect of Fox News larger than 0.5 percentage points. The results are robust to town-level controls, state and county fixed effects, and alternative specifications. We also find no significant effect of Fox News on voter turnout. Our results imply that Fox News convinced between 0 and 1.5 percent of its viewers to vote Republican. The evidence is consistent with the view that voters are sophisticated and filter out media bias. Alternatively, voters may display a form of confirmatory bias.