manding that they must be held on the first Tuesday following the first
Monday of November, every four years
16
. While the end point of the presi-
dential campaign is exogenously fixed by the Election Day, the starting point
is not exogenous, and depends on the choices made by the relevant agents,
i.e. the candidates and the candidates’ parties, the mass media and the pub-
lic. Nonetheless, a typical dictum is that the presidential campaign starts
on Labour Day
17
, namely the first Monday in September, and ends with the
Election Day.
The idea is that the newspaper, by increasing during the presidential
campaign period the frequency of articles about issues owned by a given
candidate, at the margin would induce its readers to go to the ballot and
vote for the candidate in question. Given the three identifying assumptions
stated above, such differential issue balance of stories during the presidential
campaign would be a symptom of the fact that the newspaper is partisan
towards the party owning the issues that are more extensively covered. Such
statement can be summarised in the following definition:
Definition 1
A newspaper has a Democratic (Republican) partisanship if
during the presidential campaign it devotes more space to issues owned by
the Democratic (Republican) party, at the expense of neutral or Republican
(Democratic) issues.
The political affiliation of the incumbent president is the second control
variable that is relevant within a time series framework.
First of all, one would like to ascertain whether there exists a systematic
association between the political colour of the incumbent president and the
kind of stories the New York Times publishes, in terms of the main topics
being addressed. Given the issue ownership hypothesis, the natural question
arising is whether there is any systematic correlation between the political
affiliation of the incumbent president and the presence of stories concerning
issues that are owned by her political party.
A positive correlation between the political affiliation of the president
and the frequency of stories about issues her political party owns could be
motivated by the fact that the newspaper is just giving an unbiased repre-
sentation of the incumbent president’s behaviour, who happens to be more
16
This is true for midterm elections as well, that are held again in November, two years
after the Presidential elections. The focus of this paper is on presidential elections only.
17
A broader concept of the campaign takes the convention of the challenger’s party, dur-
ing which the presidential candidate is officially nominated, as the starting point thereof.
19
Convention