This article provides a review of recent literature in economics on the effect of mass media on politics. The focus is on the welfare effects of mass media. I also discuss the likely implications of existing behavioral theories of media effects, developed outside of economics

This paper delivers a precise recommendation for how presidential candidates should allocate their resources to maximize the probability of gaining a majority in the Electoral College. A two-candidate, probabilistic-voting model reveals that more resources should be devoted to states which are...

This chapter investigates how media coverage filters information and how this affects political accountability and policy. I first present a baseline model of media coverage and its effect on political accountability. The model is used to discuss the welfare consequences of private provision of...

This paper studies how social media affect protest dynamics in China during 2009-2017. Based on 13.2 billion microblog posts, we use tweets and retweets to measure social media communication across cities and exploit its rapid expansion for identification. We find that despite strict government...