DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS
Dear all,
You are cordially invited to the following seminar at the Department of
Economics in Namur.
Hope to see you all,
The organizing team.
“Words versus Bullets: Media and
Democracy with Coercion”
Juan Fernando Vargas (Universidad del Rosario)
Speaker: Juan
Fernando Vargas
Date and time: Tuesday, April 14 (Thursday), 2011 from 16:30 to 18:00
Room: Camille Joset (401), 4th floor, Rempart de la Vierge 8, Namur
Abstract
A growing strand of the political economy literature has stressed the crucial role of the media in
facilitating the flow of candidates’ information to voters. This research, which has focused on the case
of developed nations, has shown that well-informed voters punish politicians’ misbehavior. We exploit
unique individual-level high-frequency data on the press coverage of over 500 politicians across 14
years, as well as time-varying data on press penetration at the municipal level, to show that media
exposure of corrupt politicians does not discipline voters in places with strong presence of armed
groups in Colombia. In particular, we find that a nation-wide scandal involving a large number of
incumbent national legislators proved to have colluded with illegal paramilitaries, did not reduce their
subsequent electoral support in places more likely to have coerced voters regardless of the level of
media penetration. Our estimates can be interpreted as causal and are robust to a number of
specifications. We conclude that the well recognized democracy-enhancing role of the media is likely
to be absent in weakly institutionalized environments.
More details on seminar series can be found at
http://www.fundp.ac.be/eco/economie/seminars/economics-seminar-2010-2011