We examine whether shared collective experiences help build a national identity, by looking at the impact of national football teams’ victories in sub-Saharan Africa. We find that individuals surveyed in the days after an important victory of their country’s national team are 37 percent less likely to identify primarily with their ethnic group, and 30 percent more likely to trust other ethnicities, than those interviewed just before. Crucially, national team achievements also reduce violence: countries that (barely) qualified to the Africa Cup of Nations experience less civil conflict (9 percent fewer episodes) in the following months than countries that (barely) did not.

Politicians may strategically time unpopular measures to coincide with newsworthy events that distract the media and the public. We test this hypothesis in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We find that Israeli attacks are more likely to occur when US news on the following day is dominated by important predictable events. Strategic timing applies to attacks that bear risk of civilian casualties and are not too costly to postpone. Content analysis suggests that Israel’s strategy aims at minimizing next-day coverage, which is especially charged with negative emotional content. Palestinian attacks do not appear to be timed to US news.

How does competition from online platforms affect the organization, performance, and editorial choices of newspapers? What are the implications of these changes for the information voters are exposed to and for their political choices? We study these questions using the staggered introduction of Craigslist (CL)—the world’s largest online platform for classified advertising—across U.S. counties between 1995 and 2009. This setting allows us to separate the effect of competition for classified advertising from other changes brought about by the Internet, and to compare newspapers that relied more or less heavily on classified ads ex ante. We find that, following the entry of CL, local newspapers reliant on classified ads experienced a significant decline in the number of management and newsroom staff, including in the number of editors covering politics. These organizational changes led to a reduction in news coverage of politics and resulted in a decline in newspaper readership, particularly among readers with high political interest. Finally, we document that reduced exposure to local political news was associated with an increase in partisan voting and increased entry and success of ideologically extreme candidates in congressional elections. Taken together, our findings shed light on the determinants of the decline of print media and on its broader implications for democratic politics.

We study the political impact of commercial television in Italy exploiting the staggered introduction of Berlusconi’s private TV network, Mediaset, in the early 1980s. We find that individuals with early access to Mediaset all-entertainment content were more likely to vote for Berlusconi’s party in 1994, when he first ran for office. The effect persists for five elections and is driven by heavy TV viewers, namely the very young and the elderly. Regarding possible mechanisms, we find that individuals exposed to entertainment TV as children were less cognitively sophisticated and civic-minded as adults, and ultimately more vulnerable to Berlusconi’s populist rhetoric.