Competing for Attention -- The Effect of Talk Radio on Elections and Political Polarization in the US

TL;DR

This study investigates how talk radio, especially the Rush Limbaugh Show, influences electoral results and political polarization in the US using a novel spatial competition measure and natural variation in radio frequencies.

Contribution

It introduces a new identification strategy based on radio frequency overlaps to assess talk radio's impact on elections and polarization.

Findings

Higher exposure to the Rush Limbaugh Show increases Trump vote share.

Republicans in high-exposure counties hold more conservative views.

Democrats in high-exposure counties become more moderate.

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of talk radio, specifically the Rush Limbaugh Show, on electoral outcomes and attitude polarization in the U.S. We propose a novel identification strategy that considers the radio space in each county as a market where multiple stations are competing for listeners' attention. Our measure of competition is a spatial Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) in radio frequencies. To address endogeneity concerns, we exploit the variation in competition based on accidental frequency overlaps in a county, conditional on the overall level of radio frequency competition. We find that counties with higher exposure to the Rush Limbaugh Show have a systematically higher vote share for Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Combining our county-level Rush Limbaugh Show exposure measure with individual survey data reveals that self-identifying Republicans in counties with higher exposure to the Show express more conservative political views, while self-identifying Democrats in these same counties express more moderate political views. Taken together, these findings provide some of the first insights on the effects of contemporary talk radio on political outcomes, both at the aggregate and individual level.