2
Most research on campaign and media effects in elections focused on countries where
television coverage of politics is strongly shaped by the non-partisan traditions of either
the BBC, or the German and Scandinavian public televisions, or the main American
networks, or all of these. To what extent the findings obtained in these countries can
generalize to other contexts has always been uncertain.
In the present paper we are concerned with the short-term electoral effects of
television broadcast only, and only in a post-communist context. We concentrate on
television broadcast that was, presumably, shaped by the desires of election campaigners.
No other forms of campaign effects will be explored. We do not consider established
democracies where, as in some Latin countries of Europe, television coverage may, at
times, be highly partisan too. We do not consider non-democratic countries or new
democracies with a long-established market economy either. Rather, our investigation is
limited to new democracies where public television, at least in the first few years after a
transition to democracy, had an unusually central role in political communications.
Apart from this characteristic of the media scene, the cases that we look at are
also similar in the presence of a peculiar political opportunity structure that authoritarian
legacies create. Thus we conceive them as a natural laboratory to study variance in
television impact and its possible causes while keeping a host of cultural, social and
political variables constant. Altogether we consider five election campaigns, which, we
believe, were typical for many late democratizing countries. The key question leading our
inquiry is as follows: under what circumstances does the apparent (ab)use of public
television for electoral propaganda purposes benefits incumbents in elections, and when
does it hurt them?
There are a number of reasons why this question assumes particular relevance in
new democracies, especially where private business and especially private television used
to have weak or no presence. First, many channels of party-voter communication are hard
to use in campaigns in these countries. For lack of both cash and service providers,
electoral campaigns can rarely rely on paid advertisements and direct mail in a major
way. At the same time, parties may also lack the membership base necessary for large-
scale personal canvassing and packed rallies. At any rate, since parties and party-voter
Convention