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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government wanted television everywhere \u2014 they wanted it fast and they wanted it to be Canadian rather than American,\u201d says Dickens. \u201cTo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Working with Mathias B\u00fchler of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit\u00e4t in Germany, Dickens analyzed the content broadcast by public and private stations and then matched each station\u2019s coverage area to riding maps to study election results and parliamentary speeches.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Canada in the 1950s, you had one channel that was public or private and you had no choice over which one you had \u2014 you can almost think of this as a coin flip,\u201d says Dickens. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once a consistent finding around voter participation was established, the next step was examining how elected representatives responded.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe CBC was trying to tie the country together,\u201d says Dickens. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Funding from the Government of Canada as part of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant announced in 2019<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d says Dickens.<\/p>\n The findings are important today because they illuminate how, as Dickens says, \u201clocal democracy runs on local news.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not something that\u2019s specific to the 1950s \u2014 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,\u201d he says. \u201cOver the last few years, we have lost hundreds of local news outlets across Canada. That\u2019s going to have implications on elections.\u201d<\/p>\n