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When do media stations support political accountability? A field experiment in Mexico

Last registered on April 19, 2016

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
When do media stations support political accountability? A field experiment in Mexico
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0001186
Initial registration date
April 19, 2016

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
April 19, 2016, 1:31 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
April 19, 2016, 1:32 PM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
Columbia University

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Harvard University
PI Affiliation
Harvard University

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2015-12-18
End date
2018-12-31
Secondary IDs
Abstract
The importance of an informed electorate for electoral accountability is widely recognized. However, while a large literature has focused on voter access to news media, little is known empirically about when media outlets choose to provide voters with indicators of their incumbent party's performance in office. This project seeks to explain the relatively low supply of incumbent performance information in Mexico using a three-year and six-period clustered design exploiting differential treatment intensity within media market clusters. We will scrape newspapers and radio stations to generate a massive corpus of text and audio news reports, before applying recent advances in text analysis and machine transcription to measure what the media does and does not report. We will first identify the extent to which search costs affect whether radio stations and newspapers report the results of independent audit reports detailing mayoral malfeasance in office. We will then identify how the effects of providing media outlets with information varies with media market competition and proximity to elections. Finally, we will identify the extent to which outlets learn to acquire information for themselves after receiving a prior treatment or local spillover. We intend for our findings to shed light on an essential but understudied condition required for voters to be able to hold governments accountable for their performance in office. This pre-analysis plan registers our experimental design and how our hypotheses will be tested.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Larreguy, Horacio, Christopher Lucas and John Marshall. 2016. "When do media stations support political accountability? A field experiment in Mexico." AEA RCT Registry. April 19. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.1186-2.0
Former Citation
Larreguy, Horacio, Christopher Lucas and John Marshall. 2016. "When do media stations support political accountability? A field experiment in Mexico." AEA RCT Registry. April 19. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/1186/history/7752
Sponsors & Partners

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
We seek to evaluate when media outlets broadcast or publish performance information about municipal and federal incumbents. To identify when media outlets support electoral accountability by reporting incumbent performance information, we conduct a three-year and six-period field experiment in Mexico. We randomize whether local radio stations and newspapers are sent easy-to-digest scorecards detailing two sources of incumbent performance each year: (1) independent audit reports documenting municipal mayoral malfeasance; and (2) scorecards detailing the Congressional activity of federal deputies.
Intervention Start Date
2016-04-04
Intervention End Date
2018-06-30

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Our main outcomes are:
(1) Media outlet reporting of municipal and federal incumbent performance.
(2) Media report sentiment toward municipal and federal incumbents.
(3) Municipal and federal incumbent party vote share.
(4) Voter turnout at municipal and federal elections.
(5) Municipal and federal incumbent performance in office.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We follow the randomized saturation design proposed by Baird et al. (2015) to capture the average treatment effect and the spillover effect on the non-treated of providing media outlet with easily accessible incumbent performance information. Within blocks of 3 similar media markets, we first randomize 1 media market into a pure control condition and 2 media markets into a partial saturation treatment condition within which half of media outlets receive our information treatment. The experiment will be conducted across 6 periods over 3 years. Treatment assignment will be fixed within years (across both intervention periods in each year), but will vary across years.
Experimental Design Details
Please see pre-analysis plan.
Randomization Method
Randomization done in office by a computer.
Randomization Unit
We employ two levels of randomization: the media market and the media outlet. For each year of the intervention (2 intervention periods per year), 2/3 of media markets will be block randomized into treatment. Within treated media markets, 1/2 of media outlets will be treated and 1/2 will be spillover outlets.
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
292 media market clusters.
Sample size: planned number of observations
9,624 media outlet reporting period observations (6 observations per media outlet).
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
In expectation, 535 outlets will be assigned to treatment, 535 to spillover, and 535 to pure control each year.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Committee on the Use of Human Subjects
IRB Approval Date
2016-01-11
IRB Approval Number
IRB15-3959
Analysis Plan

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Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials