As Ontarians prepare to head to the polls for a municipal election, a Brock economist is sharing insights into how television shaped historical political behaviour.

Associate Professor Andrew Dickens says policy developed to facilitate the rollout of Canadian television in the 1950s has created a unique opportunity to measure the impacts of different broadcast types on both voters and elected representatives.

“The government wanted television everywhere — they wanted it fast and they wanted it to be Canadian rather than American,” says Dickens. “To establish this quick expansion of the network, no two stations could service the same television market, which meant that a community either got a CBC public station or a private station, but not both.”

Working with Mathias Bühler of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Germany, Dickens analyzed the content broadcast by public and private stations and then matched each station’s coverage area to riding maps to study election results and parliamentary speeches.

They found that the national focus of CBC content resulted in lower voter turnout in ridings served by public stations, where voters received less local news. In ridings served by private stations, turnout held steady at pre-television levels.

“In Canada in the 1950s, you had one channel that was public or private and you had no choice over which one you had — you can almost think of this as a coin flip,” says Dickens. “We go to great lengths to break down the historical record to show that private stations tended to be much more local in content, whereas the CBC was much more national and that resulted in different political outcomes.”

Once a consistent finding around voter participation was established, the next step was examining how elected representatives responded.

The researchers developed a method to analyze the text of political speeches in Parliament to determine how often representatives spoke about their own communities versus the rest of the country.

They found that Members of Parliament in CBC ridings spoke less about the ridings they represented, won re-election by wider margins and voted more often along party lines.

“The CBC was trying to tie the country together,” says Dickens. “The public broadcaster was doing just what it was created to do, but the cost was a weaker link between voters and their own local representatives.”

Funding from the Government of Canada as part of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant announced in 2019 supported the digitization of decades of election results and electoral maps as well as the modelling of the dispersion of television signals across the country based on engineering records.

“We basically developed every piece of data from scratch, so it was a lot of time and effort and support from research assistants at Brock and in Germany,” says Dickens.

The findings are important today because they illuminate how, as Dickens says, “local democracy runs on local news.”

“This is not something that’s specific to the 1950s — the 1950s was just a nice context because the single-station policy allowed us to methodologically make credible claims of how content influences political behaviour,” he says. “Over the last few years, we have lost hundreds of local news outlets across Canada. That’s going to have implications on elections.”

Dickens and Bühler published “National content and local political consequences: Evidence from public and private television” in the Journal of Public Economics this summer and have begun looking at more social and economic impacts of Canada’s television rollout.

“Particularly because the CBC’s mandate from the beginning has been to foster Canadian consciousness, the next aspects of our project are to try to see the extent to which it has achieved its mandate,” says Dickens.